THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 

IN  MEMORY  OF 
MRS.  VIRGINIA  B.  SPORER 


TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 


TOWARDS   A   SANE 
FEMINISM 


BY 

WILMA  MEIKLE 


NEW  YORK 
ROBERT  M.  McBRIDE  &  COMPANY 

1917 


GREAT  BRITAIN   BY  THE  RIVERSfDE  PRESS  LIMITED 
EDINBURGH 


PREFACE 

A  BOOK  on  questions  so  much  alive  as  those 
of  feminism  cannot  be  expected  to  fit  every 
stage  of  their  growth.  Since  the  proofs  of  these 
essays  were  corrected  the  Prime  Minister  has 
recanted  his  former  opinion  of  the  suffragists' 
claims ;  by  the  time  the  book  leaves  the 
printers',  Parliament  may  either  have  en- 
franchised women  or  given  a  definite  pledge 
of  its  intention  of  doing  so  when  peace  is 
declared.  But  as  the  writer  has  throughout 
treated  the  vote  as  one  of  the  least  important 
of  feminists'  demands  and  needs,  the  inclusion 
of  women  in  the  electoral  register  will  hardly 
affect  her  arguments. 

WILMA  MEIKLE. 

August  23,  1916. 


2041926 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

jl.   A   CALL  TO   REPENTANCE  .                 .           9 

II.   THE   BUSS -BE  ALE  BLUNDER  .                 .         21 

III.  GETTING  EXPERIENCE        .  .                  .35 

IV.  THE      REDISCOVERY      OF      THE  WORKING 

MAN      .  .  .  .  .45 

V.   THE  BREAK-UP  OF  THE  LADY        .  .         59 

VI.   A  BIRD   IN  THE  HAND        .  .  .70 

VII.   SIMPLIFYING  SEX  PROBLEMS  .  .         82 

VIII.   HOW  TO  BE  MORAL  THOUGH  MARRIED  .         98 

IX.   BETWEEN    THE    HOME    AND    THE    LABOUR 

MARKET  .  .  .  .111 

X.   THE  SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  .       127 

XI.   THE   FORTUNE   OF  WAR     .  .  .       148 

XII.   A   STRAIGHT  TIP  FOR  FEMINISTS  .  .159 


A    CALL   TO    REPENTANCE 

IN  primitive  times  women  carried  their 
husbands'  burdens  to  leave  men  free  to  fight. 
To-day,  after  centuries  of  social  development 
and  years  of  advance  towards  feminine 
emancipation,  women  have  returned  to  the 
old  privilege  of  bearing  men's  burdens  in 
warfare.  But  to-day  the  task  is  heavier.  It 
demands  more  intelligence  and  longer  hours 
and  harder  work,  and  in  some  cases  greater 
personal  danger.  Yet  it  is  a  task  that  is 
eagerly  shouldered.  More  than  eighty  per 
cent,  of  the  total  number  of  girls  in  Britain 
between  the  ages  of  fifteen  and  twenty-five 
are  said  to  be  now  working  for  a  living, 
and  their  number  increases  daily.  Soon  the 
labour  market  will  be  crowded  out  by  women 
who  had  never  supposed  that  it  would  be 
necessary  for  them  to  earn  at  all — girls  whose 
fathers  have  been  killed  in  the  war,  widows 
with  inadequate  pensions,  women  of  all  ages 
with  disabled  relatives  partially  dependent 
upon  them,  girls  who  have  been  impelled  to 
9 


10      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

work  by  patriotism  and  have  acquired  a  taste 
for  self-dependence.  And  from  all  our  un- 
certainties about  the  social  problems  that 
will  follow  the  war,  which  political  party  we 
shall  uphold  or  whether  political  parties  will 
be  of  any  account  at  all,  and  what  religion  or 
philosophy  we  shall  adopt  or  invent  for  our 
guidance,  there  stands  out  the  conviction 
that  whether  they  call  themselves  suffragists 
or  feminists  or  guild  socialists  or  by  any 
other  label,  far  greater  numbers  of  women 
than  before  the  war  will  be  clamouring  for 
privileges  which  have  hitherto  been  with- 
held from  them.  The  vote,  to  be  sure, 
may  have  been  granted  long  before  the 
war  is  ended.  It  is  even  possible  that 
women  will  be  enfranchised  principally 
because  the  war  has  created  a  scarcity 
of  suitable  parliamentary  candidates  and 
that  the  country  will  feel  the  need  of 
women  in  Parliament  before  it  is  acutely 
conscious  of  the  need  of  them  as  electors. 
But  the  vote,  after  all,  is  one  of  the 
least  of  the  feminist  needs,  and  it  is  for 
the  removal  of  greater  grievances  than  their 
political  nullity  that  women  will  be  agitating 
after  the  war.  The  feminist  movement  will 
be  a  much  more  formidable  movement  and  a 
much  more  successful  movement.  Yet  while 


A  CALL  TO  REPENTANCE         11 

the  war  has  been  rapidly  revolutionising  the 
position  of  women  in  industry  the  wanton 
misunderstanding  of  the  truce  declared  by  the 
suffragists  in  August  1914  has  left  women 
leaderless  and  their  new  needs  inarticulate. 
The  suffrage  movement  was  very  glad  of  a 
rest.  But  whatever  the  merits  or  demerits 
of  that  movement,  the  suffrage  societies  had 
gripped  the  imaginations  of  rebellious  women 
and  had  accustomed  them  to  look  to  those 
societies  for  direction.  There  was  nothing 
in  the  suffrage  truce  to  make  such  guidance 
impossible.  The  leading  suffragists,  how- 
ever, flung  themselves  into  activities  which, 
though  undoubtedly  valuable  to  the  nation, 
had  no  very  close  connection  with  the  needs 
of  the  new  workers.  They  regarded  it  as  a 
stupendous  advance  for  women  when  new 
kinds  of  employment  were  opened  to  them, 
and  did  not  pause  to  consider  that  the 
conditions  of  their  employment  might  be 
definitely  and  dangerously  retrogressive. 
Harems,  after  all,  are  usually  well  provisioned, 
and  liberty  makes  a  poor  show  against  a 
background  of  starvation.  It  is  more  im- 
portant for  the  mass  of  women  that  munition 
workers  and  bus  conductors  should  be  well 
paid  than  that  the  higher  grades  of  the  Civil 
Service  should  be  opened  to  a  small  number 


12      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

of  their  sex  or  that  a  solitary  Englishwoman 
should  receive  a  diplomatic  appointment  at 
Christiania.  The  failure  of  the  suffragists  to 
champion  insistently  the  needs  of  women 
workers  at  so  critical  a  period  cannot  but 
weaken  their  influence  after  the  war,  and 
there  is  a  fairly  widespread  feeling  that,  at  a 
time  when  the  enormously  swollen  numbers 
of  women  workers  and  their  entrance  into 
new  kinds  of  employment  makes  a  vigilant 
attention  to  the  conditions  of  their  work  more 
than  ever  necessary,  the  attitude  of  the 
suffrage  societies  has  from  the  very  first  in- 
clined to  the  admission  that  an  insistence  on 
health  safeguards  and  good  pay  is  inconsist- 
ent with  patriotism.  "  I  have  told  my  wife," 
writes  a  working  man  who  a  few  years  ago 
drove  his  wife  into  a  suffrage  society  almost 
at  the  point  of  the  carving-knife,  "  I  have 
told  my  wife  that  she  had  better  keep  her 
suffrage  subscription  and  buy  us  more  butter. 
A  fat  lot  the  suffragists  are  doing  for  working 
women  now  !  "  Earlier  in  the  war  one  heard 
of  women  ruptured  through  working  at  too 
heavy  machines  in  munition  factories,  of  girls 
docked  of  their  pay  because  the  factory  lights 
were  extinguished  during  a  Zeppelin  raid 
and  the  workers  stood  idle  at  their  machines, 
of  women  working  without  proper  sanitary 


A  CALL  TO  REPENTANCE         13 

accommodation  at  Woolwich,  and  suffering 
from  sickness  and  skin  disease  through  the 
nature  of  their  work  there.  The  suffrage 
societies  have  been  too  intent  upon  their  new 
activities  to  attend  to  the  grievances  which 
were  once  their  primary  concern.  There  has 
been  a  stupid  belief  that  the  truce  from 
political  agitation  completely  shelved  fem- 
inist problems.  The  chief  suffrage  societies 
have  accordingly  veiled  their  raison  d'etre, 
and  have  turned  to  the  work  of  supplying 
arsenals  with  women  workers  or  equipping 
field  hospitals  or  inciting  the  public  against 
naturalised  Germans.  And  while  this  im- 
mersion in  war  work  is  a  tacit  admission  that 
the  old  feminism  is  ended,  they  have  so  far 
neglected  to  prepare  for  the  new. 

The  war  has  divided  the  feminist  struggle 
into  two  periods — a  period  of  failure  and 
humiliation  which  is  behind  us,  and  a  period 
of  unknown  character  which  will  begin  with 
the  peace  treaty.  And  meanwhile  it  pro- 
vides from  the  clamour  and  deception  of 
meetings  and  propaganda  a  truce  which 
makes  it  possible  to  prepare  for  the  new  cam- 
paign. It  has  done  other  things  for  women. 
Those  of  us  who  have  been  knocked  down  and 
kicked  in  pre-war  days  by  gentle  English- 
men who  objected  to  our  speeches  realise 


14     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

with  a  chuckle  that  when  peace  comes  women 
will  be  able  to  transform  the  most  unruly 
audience  into  a  crowd  of  seraphs  by  begging 
them  not  to  behave  like  Huns.  The  whole 
task  of  feminists  in  this  country  will  be  made 
infinitely  more  agreeable  by  the  new  spirit 
of  chivalry  towards  women  which  is  quite 
foreign  to  us,  and  is  being  created  by  nothing 
on  earth  but  our  hatred  of  the  Germans. 
But  while  a  new  courtesy  will  make  a  screwed 
courage  and  resolve  no  longer  necessary  in 
feminist  propaganda  work,  it  does  not  follow 
that  it  is  the  old  gospel  and  the  old  policy 
that  will  win  the  social  and  economic  liberty 
which  is  the  real  aim  of  feminists.  At 
present  it  seems  probable  that  an  immense 
amount  of  time  and  money  and  energy  will  be 
wasted  in  the  early  years  of  peace  in  attempt- 
ing to  exhume  the  old  dead  methods,  if  their 
death  is  not  now  decently  and  publicly 
acknowledged.  Let  us  while  there  is  still 
time  for  repentance  humbly  and  with  tears 
confess  that  all  that  was  done  and  undone 
by  pre-war  feminists  was  nothing  but  a  pro- 
digious crop  of  feminine  wild  oats.  Let  us 
admit  that  they  were  merely  gaining  the 
experience  which  is  a  popular  euphemism  for 
mistakes.  Let  us  own  that  they  were  led 
astray  by  a  mistaken  policy  and  by  incom- 


A  CALL  TO  REPENTANCE         15 

petent  leaders.  For  in  the  earlier  part  of  the 
Safe-Britain  period,  between  1815  and  1914, 
women  were  developing  individual  ambitions 
and  were  beginning  to  prove  what  women 
individually  could  accomplish.  The  desire 
to  raise  the  status  of  a  whole  sex  was  a  later 
growth,  and  when  it  came  the  women  who 
first  embraced  the  new  gospel  were  too  much 
occupied  with  their  own  work  to  preach  it 
themselves.  Even  in  the  short  period  of 
abnormally  rapid  development  in  feminist 
thought  between  the  South  African  and  the 
present  war  the  leaders  were  never  quite 
worthy,  intellectually,  of  a  large  number  of 
the  rank  and  file.  The  best  feminine  in- 
tellects having  been  caught  up  into  profes- 
sions, the  suffrage  movement  had  to  be  led 
by  those  who  were  left  over  from  more  rigidly 
classified  activities.  And  for  the  most  part 
it  had  to  be  led  by  women  communally 
supported — that  is,  by  women  possessed  of 
so-called  independent  incomes.  Among  men 
the  minds  best  able  to  cope  with  modern 
affairs  are  usually  found  in  those  who  have 
to  earn  a  living.  Their  abilities  secure  in 
early  manhood  enough  money  to  make  a 
political  career  possible  later.  Walpoles  and 
Newcastles  and  Pitts  could  deal  with  the 
upper-class  politics  of  the  eighteenth  century, 


16     TOWARDS  A  SANE    FEMINISM 

but  to-day  a  Rosebery  fades  away  into 
nothingness,  and  the  statesmen  who  win 
confidence  have  been  shaped  by  economic 
struggle.  It  was  the  misfortune  of  the 
suffrage  movement  that  for  the  most  part  its 
leaders  were  women  whose  minds  had  never 
been  winnowed  by  personal  experience  of 
economic  need. 

This  is  not  true  of  the  Pankhursts,  and 
Mrs  Pankhurst  and  her  daughter  will  always 
be  regarded  by  historians  as  the  two  great 
personalities  of  pre-war  feminism.  What- 
ever their  faults,  there  was  no  one  else  who 
really  mattered.  Beside  them  there  were 
in  the  suffrage  world  no  individuals  ;  there 
were  only  societies.  But  Mrs  Pankhurst  was 
a  woman  of  strong  emotions  rather  than  of 
strong  intellect.  Her  feelings  were  a  power  ; 
her  thoughts  were  a  reflection.  It  was  her 
emotion,  very  slightly  fortified  by  the  ability 
of  her  daughter,  that  created  the  militant 
movement.  And  her  emotion  was  really 
directed  by  the  judgment  of  the  earliest 
pioneers.  Militancy  was  a  Pankhurst  notion, 
but  it  would  never  have  come  into  the  Pank- 
hursts' heads  if  those  heads  had  not  been 
stuffed  by  the  pioneers  with  the  belief  that 
political  enfranchisement  was  the  only  way 
of  raising  women's  economic  and  social 


A  CALL  TO  REPENTANCE          17 

status.  As  for  Miss  Christabel  Pankhurst, 
she  had  the  gift  of  speaking  well  when  she 
looked  plain,  and  looking  charming  when  she 
spoke  badly,  so  that  her  speeches  were  always 
admirable.  But  she  had  the  mind  of  a  cap- 
able, ambitious,  well-informed  lawyer  whose 
judgments  are  uncultured  by  the  compre- 
hension of  weakness.  In  all  her  doctrines 
there  was  a  hard  logic  which  cut  a  sorry 
figure  beside  the  illogical  nature  of  humanity. 
By-and-by  it  became  evident  that  her 
conclusions  were  habitually  drawn  from 
insufficient  data,  that  there  was  in  her  a  lack 
of  sympathy  which  robbed  her  of  experience 
and  confidences.  She  was  perfectly  right 
when  she  decided  that  sex  grievances  were 
at  the  root  of  the  feminist  troubles.  But 
there  appeared  to  be  nothing  in  her  own 
nature,  no  imagination  in  her  mind,  to  give 
her  any  clue  to  the  real  causes  of  those 
grievances.  It  would  be  hard  to  discover  a 
more  one-sided  effusion  than  her  celebrated 
pamphlet,  The  Great  Scourge  and  How  to 
End  It.  Not  only  does  she  glibly  assume 
that  because  she  herself  is  content  with 
spinsterhood  it  follows  that  for  all  women 
a  life  of  public  activities  without  domestic 
happiness  is  satisfying;  she  totally  ignores 
the  fact  that  a  large  part  of  the  existing 


18      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

prostitution  is  due  to  the  coldness  and  ugly 
materialism  of  married  women  on  the  one 
hand,  and,  on  the  other,  to  the  refusal  of 
modern  women  to  marry  struggling  men  and 
their  expectation  of  being  supported  by  their 
husbands.  And  it  is  possible  from  this  book 
to  prove  beyond  a  shadow  of  doubt  that  all 
the  most  godly  of  our  acquaintances,  and 
especially  all  the  directors  of  our  youth,  and 
all  the  most  notoriously  blameless  of  the  con- 
spicuous men  and  women  of  our  time,  have 
some  of  the  symptoms  of  the  "  scourge  "  in 
an  acquired  or  hereditary  form.  Our  gentle, 
maidenly,  anaemic  cousins,  our  pious  spinster 
aunts  suffering  from  angina  pectoris  and 
pleurisy,  are  immediately  suspect,  and  we 
close  the  book  with  the  conviction  that  the 
race  cannot  continue  eugenically  without  the 
assistance  of  its  author. 

This  is  no  digression,  for  her  pamphlet 
provides  an  unsurpassable  example  of  Miss 
Pankhurst's  limitations  as  a  leader.  The 
bitter  injustice  to  men  which  characterised 
the  daughter  and  the  uncontrolled  emotional- 
ism of  the  mother  together  hurled  that  branch 
of  suffragism  which  the  Pankhursts  led  into 
the  quagmire  of  militancy.  The  courage, 
skill  and  endurance  of  hundreds  of  women 
during  the  political  campaign  have  got  to  be 


A  CALL  TO  REPENTANCE          19 

considered  quite  apart  from  that  campaign's 
wisdom.  "  A  thing  is  not  necessarily  true," 
said  Oscar  Wilde,  "  because  a  man  dies  for 
it."  Just  as  the  memory  of  Edith  Cavell's 
death  will  always  be  treasured  by  her  country- 
men and  held  glorious  to  womanhood,  in 
spite  of  the  breach  of  professional  etiquette 
involved  in  her  heroism,  so  future  ages  will 
hold  it  a  small  thing  that  militancy  was 
ridiculous  and  useless  when  militants  them- 
selves were  often  so  ennobling  an  example  of 
feminine  endurance  and  sacrifice.  And  the 
adventurous  and  persevering  spirit  of  many 
of  the  constitutional  suffragists  will  ultim- 
ately atone  for  the  folly  of  the  suffrage  policy. 
For  suffragists  of  every  brand  gave  proof 
of  the  potential  worth  to  society  of  many 
feminine  qualities  which  had  never  before 
been  allowed  to  reveal  themselves.  But 
though  the  historian  takes  long  views  and 
slurs  over  many  mistakes  which  distance 
minimises,  the  politician  cannot  afford  to 
neglect  details.  The  politician  of  to-morrow 
will  have  to  consider  the  policy  of  the  feminists 
rather  than  their  personal  virtues.  She  will 
have  to  determine  whether  that  policy  was 
helping  to  gain  their  ends.  And  if  a  careful 
examination  into  the  history  of  pre-war 
feminism  convinces  her  that  the  suffrage 


20      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

campaign  was  doing  nothing  to  improve  the 
position  of  women,  and  did  not  even  appear 
likely  to  obtain  the  vote,  she  will  naturally 
wish  to  inquire  into  the  possibility  of  an 
alternative  policy. 


II 

THE    BUSS-BEALE    BLUNDER 

WHEN  that  disorderly  advance, "  The  Women's 
Movement,"  exhausted  half  its  energy  in 
attempting  to  force  positions  utterly  irrelev- 
ant to  the  real  objects  of  its  campaign,  it  was 
misled  by  its  leaders'  ignorance  of  the  country 
they  were  invading.  They  were  women 
delicately  unaware  of  the  kitchen  side  of 
politics,  genteelly  unacquainted  with  the 
stupendous  significance  of  commerce,  women 
who  had  been  bred  in  drawing-rooms  where 
the  ruling  class  posed  as  men  whose  power 
was  based  upon  culture  and  oratory.  Pacing 
the  terrace  of  the  House  of  Commons  after 
a  restrained  consumption  of  parliamentary 
cakes  and  strawberries,  discussing  European 
crises  and  Westminster  reputations  in  an 
expensive  garden,  releasing  opinions  on  books 
and  careers  and  the  drama  from  the  vigilant 
suavity  of  a  political  dinner-party,  the  ruling 
class  appeared  to  its  nieces  and  spinster 
cousins  as  a  group  of  high-brows  created 
by  the  universities.  Life  was  bowdlerised  for 

21 


22     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

their  womenfolk  into  a  Mary  Ward  novel. 
There  was  the  background  of  a  political  Italy 
where  British  ministers  and  political  writers 
rejuvenated  political  creeds,  and  an  English 
foreground  in  which  the  parliamentary  careers 
of  men  like  William  Ashe  and  the  extremely 
superior  husband  of  Marcella  obliterated  the 
mightier  interests  of  the  masses.  It  was  a 
time  when  the  Mayfair  importance  of  Parlia- 
ment had  produced  the  Victorian  mother- 
hood which  dreamed  of  a  Westminster  career 
for  its  sons  as  mediaeval  mothers  dreamed 
of  a  triple  crown,  and  Scottish  mothers  in 
the  seventies  of  an  Edinburgh  pulpit.  St 
Stephen's  was  the  popular  spring-board  for 
ambition.  Manufacturers  hated  their  manu- 
facturing and  pined  to  write  to  their  old 
neighbours  on  House  of  Commons  notepaper. 
Prosperous  shipbuilders  counted  their  thou- 
sands as  dross  when  compared  with  the 
social  advantages  of  an  unpaid  Member  of 
Parliament.  Obscure  men  like  Thomas 
Babington  Macaulay  and  Benjamin  Disraeli 
had  been  rushed  into  social  eminence  by 
their  flowing  rhetoric  at  Westminster.  And 
jostling  the  country-house  successes  of 
politicians  came  the  bishops  and  weighty 
writers  who  had  sucked  their  wisdom  from 
the  universities.  All  the  glittering  array  of 


THE  BUSS-BEALE  BLUNDER       23 

celebrity  that  dazzled  restless  women  in  the 
drawing-rooms  of  the  great  and  loosed  their 
envy  seemed  to  base  its  achievements  upon 
politics  and  learning.  And  the  aftermath  of 
the  French  Revolution  was  sweeping  women 
out  of  their  narrower  interests  into  a  swirling 
sea  of  desire.  They  wanted — the  women 
who  had  time  to  think  about  these  things 
— an  absorbing  occupation,  they  wanted  to 
develop  their  minds,  they  wanted  to  think 
and  to  know,  they  wanted  power,  they 
wanted  to  be  of  conspicuous  use,  they  wanted 
very  emphatically  to  prove  that  the  men  who 
had,  quite  without  reflection  and  as  auto- 
matically as  they  walked  and  ate  and  slept, 
believed  with  the  scornful  conviction  of  a 
Jonathan  Swift  in  the  mental  inferiority  of 
women,  were  as  sounding  brass  and  a  tinkling 
cymbal.  And  as  the  only  views  permitted 
to  them  of  the  men  with  whom  they  wanted 
to  compete  were  the  view  politic  and  the  view 
academic,  it  was  naturally  in  the  electorate 
and  in  the  universities  that  women  strove  to 
prove  their  prowess. 

So,  in  that  legendary  Victorian  age  when 
the  public  life  of  England  was  commercial  in 
action  and  romantic  in  spirit  and  Aristotelian 
in  manner,  the  pioneers  of  feminism  were 
tricked  by  appearances,  and  pursued  those 


24     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

two  lean  quarries,  academic  success  and  the 
vote.  They  built  colleges  for  women,  they 
founded  public  schools  and  high  schools 
which  caught  up  into  the  Buss-Beale  educa- 
tional system  the  doomed  daughters  of  the 
middle  and  lower-middle  classes.  Head 
down,  those  game  old  pioneers  charged  the 
professions.  In  time  they  made  it  possible 
for  really  capable  women,  expensively 
educated,  to  earn  for  thirty  or  even  forty 
years  an  annual  income  of  from  one  to  two 
hundred  pounds.  It  was  a  concession,  that 
network  of  schools,  to  the  needs — not, 
certainly,  of  the  masses — but  of  those  un- 
explored thousands  of  middleness  from  which 
the  pioneers  continually  recruited  their  hench- 
men. The  feminist  leaders  were  probably 
aware  that  they  themselves  had  learnt  more 
from  governesses  and  tutors  and  their  own 
libraries  and  relatives  than  could  possibly  be 
taught  in  the  unwieldy  forms  of  the  new 
schools.  Universities  were  a  different  matter ; 
the  laurels  to  be  gained  there  were  coveted  by 
all.  But  the  supreme  aim  of  the  pioneers 
was  the  political  power  which  so  notably 
distinguished  the  other  sex  as  the  subjector. 
Right  up  to  August  of  the  year  1914,  that 
ghastly  August  of  disruption  and  despair  in 
innumerable  leagues  and  unions,  the  suffrage 


THE  BUSS-BEALE  BLUNDER       25 

agitation  was  the  central  advance  of  femin- 
ism. From  time  to  time  there  were  flank 
movements.  There  was  the  sartorial  crusade 
of  mildly  domestic  women  who  found  salva- 
tion in  wearing  "  reformed  "  dress.  There 
was  the  campaign  of  religious  women  who 
invented  for  private  use  new  mysteries 
and  worshipped  a  feminine  Jehovah,  or  an 
incarnate  male  deity  who  exemplified  for 
humanity  the  ideal  married  love  by  his 
marriage  to  an  incarnate  goddess.  There 
were  the  women  who  proclaimed  for  the  first 
time  the  right  of  wives  to  refuse  maternity. 
There  were  those  who  preached  the  right  of 
unmarried  women  to  bear  one  child  and  were 
disconcerted  when  their  daughters  obeyed 
their  precepts.  There  were  the  bolder  spirits 
who  wrote  rather  pedantic  little  notes 
petitioning  leading  statesmen  and  writers  to 
join  them  in  creating  eugenic  children.  There 
were  women  who  condemned  marriage 
altogether  as  a  degrading  enslavement.  And 
just  before  the  war  there  was  becoming  con- 
spicuous a  number  of  young  women,  most  of 
them  graduates,  who  boasted  themselves  the 
disciples  of  the  hetairce  of  the  Aspasian  period. 
But  these  side  issues,  these  disorganised 
attempts  to  shake  the  accepted  opinion  of  the 
inevitable  destiny  of  women,  hardly  affected 


26     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

the  main  action.  The  headier  feminists 
might  resort  to  theosophy  or  free  love  or 
vegetarian  diet,  but  the  established  leaders 
were  still  concerned  with  the  demand  for  the 
vote  and  the  assault  upon  the  male  monopoly 
of  the  more  profitable  professions.  Even 
when  the  solid  and  conventional  braininess 
of  the  earlier  pioneers  was  supplanted  by 
the  nimble  brilliance  of  the  Pankhursts,  the 
plan  of  campaign  was  virtually  unaltered. 
That  raids  and  destruction  by  the  voteless 
were  preferred  to  voters'  petitions  was  a 
small  matter  when  their  object  remained  a 
conquest  which  involved  a  bleeding  waste 
of  individual  careers  and  at  that  stage 
of  the  feminist  advance  must  itself  prove 
valueless. 

For  these  pioneers,  drilled  by  Mary  Woll- 
stonecraft  and  John  Stuart  Mill  and  the  Buss- 
Beale  gang  and  the  exponents  of  country- 
house  culture,  had  not  yet  explored  the 
England  of  their  own  day.  In  the  Florence 
of  Lorenzo  the  Magnificent  or  the  Russia  of 
Catherine  II.  the  wisdom  of  the  schools  and 
political  sharp  practice  might  indeed  have 
pillared  the  gate  to  feminine  liberty.  But  in 
the  nineteenth  century  power  and  the  liberty 
which  power  gives  had  nothing  to  do  with 
culture  and  very  little  to  do  with  political 


THE  BUSS-BEALE  BLUNDER       27 

influence.  They  depended — vulgarly,  if  your 
refinement  demands  the  admission — upon 
the  possession  of  capital  and  commercial 
status.  Men  were  slapped  into  Parliament 
by  the  hearty  good  will  of  manufacturers 
and  merchants  and  tradesmen  rich  enough 
to  control  the  electorate.  Concessions  were 
granted  to  working  men,  their  economic  con- 
ditions were  bettered,  the  vote  itself  was 
yielded  to  them,  because  their  commercial 
value  was  great  enough  to  make  their  opposi- 
tion and  rebellion  a  commercial  disaster.  It 
was  precisely  because  the  commercial  value 
of  women  was  low  that  it  was  possible  for 
capitalists — long  after  it  had  become  worth 
while  to  make  use  of  that  low  value  in 
industry — to  continue  to  oppress  them  far 
more  severely  than  men  workers  were 
oppressed  and  to  continue  to  jeer  at  their 
impotent  clamour  for  political  power.  Up 
and  down  the  country  went  bands  of  heroic 
but  very  pitiful  and  rather  ludicrous  women 
preaching  that  they  had  a  right  to  the  vote, 
that  the  country  would  be  better  if  they  had 
it,  and  that  it  was  horribly  unjust  to  with- 
hold it  from  them.  It  was  all  dreadfully  true, 
but  the  average  male  listened  to  them  with  a 
mild  wonder  and  felt  at  the  bottom  of  his 
inarticulate  soul  both  the  irrelevance  of  their 


28     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

demand  and  the  staggering  impudence  of  it. 
For  a  sex  utterly  without  commercial  stand- 
ing was  claiming  an  official  share  in  the 
control  of  a  nation  which  was  governed  by 
commercial  values.  If  the  feminist  pioneers 
had  used  the  wealth  and  ability  which  many 
of  them  possessed  to  embark  upon  industrial 
enterprises,  if  they  had  resolved  to  seize  a 
place  among  those  "  captains  of  industry  " 
who  were  already  the  heroes  of  journalists 
and  politicians,  if  Mrs  Fawcett  and  Mrs 
Pankhurst  had  devoted  their  organising 
powers  to  commerce  and  Miss  Christabel 
Pankhurst  had  become  a  more  brilliant 
Callisthenes  to  some  greater  firm  than 
Selfridge,  then  the  history  of  the  suffrage 
agitation  would  make  smoother  and  more 
progressive  reading.  It  is  inconceivable  that 
a  suffrage  league  as  large  as  the  National 
Union  of  Women's  Suffrage  Societies  or  the 
Women's  Social  and  Political  Union  could 
have  demanded  the  vote  in  vain  if  its  execu- 
tive committee  had  been  composed  of  women 
colliery  owners  and  soap  makers  and  iron 
masters  and  cocoa  manufacturers  and  women 
with  a  controlling  interest  in  some  great 
armament  works  or  shipping  firm.  Be- 
cause the  suffrage  officials  were  intellectuals 
who  carried  no  weight  at  all  in  the  everyday 


THE  BUSS-BEALE  BLUNDER      29 

business  of  the  nation,  it  was  possible  again 
and  again  to  slight  and  ignore  them.  And  if 
the  bulk  of  the  women  behind  them  had  been 
skilled  mechanics  or  prosperous  shopkeepers 
or  highly  salaried  engineers  and  factory 
managers,  their  commercial  importance 
would  have  been  great  enough  to  compel 
attention.  But  by  far  the  greater  number 
of  the  members  of  the  suffrage  societies  were 
sweated  school  teachers  and  clerks  and 
hospital  nurses,  struggling  secretaries  and 
journalists,  underfed  shop  assistants,  wives 
financially  dependent  upon  their  husbands. 
The  working  women  whose  numbers  were 
held  by  some  to  make  them  worth  all  these 
adherents  from  the  middle  and  lower-middle 
classes  were  usually  too  poor  to  join  a  suffrage 
society,  and  their  lack  of  mechanical  skill 
made  them  so  entirely  negligible  in  public 
affairs  that  the  faint  whisper  of  their  needs 
hardly  penetrated  to  Westminster.  Instead 
of  beginning  the  feminist  campaign  scientific- 
ally by  giving  to  at  least  enough  women  to 
carry  weight  in  the  political  world  that  busi- 
ness and  industrial  value  which  the  country 
demanded  of  its  voters,  the  leaders  frittered 
the  money  and  the  strength  and  the  abilities 
and  the  lives  of  their  followers  on  a  fruitless 
agitation  and  an  out-of-date  system  of 


30     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

education.  In  an  age  when  socialism  glaringly 
was  not,  they  acted  as  though  they  lived  in 
some  Utopia  which  preferred  wit  and  moral 
worth  to  the  acquisitive  faculty.  The  vision  of 
socialism  had  dazzled  their  eyes  till  existing 
facts  were  a  mist  before  them.  It  was  true 
that  in  a  socialist  state  education  and  a 
knowledge  of  the  electorate  might  be  the  best 
preparation  for  enfranchisement  and  might 
themselves  secure  it.  But  the  feminist 
leaders  were  living  under  capitalism,  and 
they  declared  that  the  vote  was  needed  by 
women  now. 

There  is  bitterness  in  the  memory  of  the 
long  struggle  for  higher  education,  for  ad- 
mission to  the  universities  and  the  more 
envied  professions,  as  the  door  to  independ- 
ence. In  those  days  every  path  was  equally 
closed  to  women.  The  storming  of  the  Stock 
Exchange,  the  entrance  into  business  enter- 
prises, would  surely  have  demanded  no 
mightier  effort  than  was  thrown  into  the  task 
selected.  And  not  only  was  the  new  school 
education  somewhat  futile  ;  it  happened  that 
the  pioneers  plumped  for  higher  education  at 
a  time  when  the  value  of  a  university  training 
even  for  men  was  already  declining.  The 
fact  that  a  man  is  a  graduate  of  Oxford  or 
Cambridge  does  not  help  him  in  commerce, 


THE  BUSS-BEALE  BLUNDER       31 

and  though  the  more  practical  universities 
have  their  technical  courses  it  remains 
doubtful  whether  from  the  business  stand- 
point a  university  is  to  be  regarded  as  other 
than  a  mediaeval  survival  or  a  fashionable 
finishing  school.  For  the  doctor,  the  lawyer, 
the  clergyman,  the  scientist  and  the  teacher 
graduation  remains  necessary  ;  from  two  of 
these  professions  women  are  still  excluded. 
Even  the  politician  in  these  days  has  little 
to  gain  from  the  university.  The  scholarly 
age  when  Pitt's  budget  figures  were  dipped 
in  quotations  from  the  classics  has  been 
succeeded  by  a  more  natural  generation 
which  feels  that  a  Latin  line  on  Mr  Balfour's 
lips  is  in  the  worst  possible  taste  in  a  House 
thronged  by  Labour  members.  To-day  the 
politician's  study  of  industrial  and  social  con- 
ditions is  merely  unduly  delayed  by  the  study 
of  Liter ce  Humaniores.  The  social  worker  or 
local  government  official  will  find  more  in- 
struction in  a  few  months  lived  in  a  Peabody 
building,  or  at  work  in  a  factory  or  work- 
shop, than  he  will  obtain  in  three  or  four 
years  at  Oxford  or  Cambridge.  The  painter, 
the  musician,  the  actor  have  little  or  nothing 
to  learn  from  an  academic  training.  The 
modern  writer  runs  a  dreadful  risk  as  an 
undergraduate  of  having  his  style  and  his 


32     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

taste  ruined  for  ever  by  the  weekly  essay 
horror,  and  the  isolation  from  normal  human 
intercourse  which  is  involved  in  college  life 
often  brands  upon  him  that  repelling  self- 
consciousness  which  blunts  his  observation 
and  drives  from  him  those  confidences  which 
feed  literature.  Most  of  the  more  brilliant 
writers  of  our  time,  Mr  Shaw,  Mr  Ford  Madox 
Hueffer,  Miss  May  Sinclair,  Mr  Arnold 
Bennett,  Mr  Joseph  Conrad  and  Mr  D.  H. 
Lawrence,  have  never  been  to  a  university. 
The  South  Kensington  training  of  Mr  H.  G. 
Wells  could  not  dull  the  experience  already 
gained  in  a  more  practical  school.  And  the 
spectacle  of  the  provocative  ideas  of  an  able 
mind  like  that  of  Mr  G.  D.  H.  Cole  stiffly 
corseted  into  the  inflexible  form  of  a  Balliol 
essay  is  an  instance  of  the  blighting  effect 
upon  letters  of  academic  taste. 

No,  the  universities  are  no  longer  required 
to  quicken  the  national  life,  and  they  no 
longer  provide  the  best  equipment  for  those 
who  must  work  for  a  living.  Just  as  Mr 
Winston  Churchill  turned  with  a  British 
courage  from  the  Admiralty  to  landscape 
painting,  so  women  to-day  must  realise  that 
they  made  a  false  start  and  must  turn  from 
the  sweated  professions  for  which  gradua- 
tion fitted  them  to  the  wide  and  opulent 


THE  BUSS-BEALE  BLUNDER       33 

possibilities  of  commerce.   A  degree  provided 
them  with  an  income  averaging  from  one 
hundred  and  twenty   to  one  hundred  and 
fifty  pounds   per  annum    and    side-tracked 
some  of  the  best  feminine  brains  into  a  grey 
and  dismal  existence  of  self-repression  and 
overwork  for  salaries  which  hardly  covered 
expenses.     To  study  philosophy  before  one 
has  experienced  the  need  of  a  philosophy,  to 
collect  facts  and  write  essays  about  the  lives 
and  policies  of  dead  people  before  one  under- 
stands anything  about  the  lives  and  policies 
of   living   people,    to   study   languages   and 
sciences  with  a  complete  detachment  from 
practical  needs,  is  at  best  a  rather  dithering 
prelude  to  a  lifetime  of  bread  winning.     It  is 
shrilled  into  a  mockery  when  its  benefits  are 
contrasted    with    the    comfortable    lives    of 
many  West  End  dressmakers  and  milliners, 
women     designers    and     house     decorators, 
who    even    now    are    often    able    to    earn 
an    income    which    not    merely   is   a   living 
but   provides   scope   for  the   acquisition  of 
knowledge   and   experience   far  wider   than 
can  possibly  be  obtained    at   a   university. 
It  is  to  be  hoped  that  the  present  emergency 
which   has   slightly   softened   our  snobbish- 
ness  and    immensely    enhanced    the    value 
and  dignity  of  manual  labour  will  hurriedly 


34     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

close  the  feminine  sheep-walk  to  the  uni- 
versities. If  the  majority  of  the  women  who 
in  peace  would  have  been  sent  to  universities 
to  gratify  the  thoughtless  ambition  of  their 
relatives  or  to  embellish  the  annual  reports 
of  their  schools  are  given  a  marketable 
education  and  a  reasonable  start  in  business, 
there  is  sound  reason  to  believe  that  the  great 
Buss-Beale  blunder  will  at  last  be  retrieved 
and  that  the  economic  status  of  women  will 
be  raised  within  sight  of  political  recognition. 
But  the  dreadful  consequence  of  that  blunder 
has  been  revealed  by  the  complete  powerless- 
ness  of  women  since  August  1914  to  oppose 
the  general  tendency  to  double  their  work 
and  halve  their  pay  in  the  name  of  patriotism. 


Ill 

GETTING     EXPERIENCE 

BEFORE  the  war  there  was  among  feminists 
a  loyalty  which  forbade  criticism.  Just  as 
to-day  it  is  felt  that  criticism  of  the  Govern- 
ment may  help  the  enemy  and  discourage  our 
allies,  so  yesterday  it  was  believed  that  an 
honest  inquiry  into  the  merits  of  the  suffrage 
policy  would  merely  brighten  the  days  of 
Mrs  Humphry  Ward  and  give  anxious  nights 
to  Mr  Philip  Snowden.  But  after  the  war 
the  Foreign  Office  and  the  War  Office  and  the 
Admiralty  and  the  Board  of  Trade  and  the 
Ministry  of  Munitions  will  all  be  shifting 
nervously  from  one  foot  to  the  other  as  they 
stand  abashed  before  the  fierce  ingratitude  of 
national  criticism .  And  now  that  there  is  an 
interlude  of  peace  in  the  feminist  agitation, 
it  becomes  both  permissible  and  necessary  to 
criticise  the  policy  of  its  pre-war  leaders. 

And   first   we   must   altogether   refuse   to 
admit  that  feminism  was  advanced  by  mili- 
tancy.    Militancy  was  a  brand  of  suffragism 
specially  prepared  by  a  tremendous  outlay  of 
35 


36     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

money  and  prayer  and  inventive  genius  to 
tickle  the  jaded  palate  of  Londoners.  And 
it  did  tickle  it.  Mr  Israel  Zangwill,  who  is  a 
Jew  and  therefore  a  typical  Londoner,  liked 
it  so  much  that  he  could  not  for  the  life  of 
him  understand  how  the  British  public  could 
be  moved  by  anything  else.  But  the  fact  is 
that  Britain  is  a  place  quite  a  long  way  from 
London.  The  eyes  of  a  horrified  London 
charwoman  nearly  leapt  from  her  face  one 
day  when  I  told  her  that  I  was  going  the  next 
morning  to  Yorkshire.  "  Oh,  miss !  "  she 
exclaimed,  "  I  do  sope  you'll  come  to  no  'arm 
in  them  parts  ;  my  father  once  went  out  to 
Yorkshire  as  a  missionary."  She  may  have 
been  confusing  the  most  complaisantly  self- 
respecting  of  all  the  English  counties  with 
some  cannibal-cursed  island  in  a  southern  sea, 
but  in  the  main  her  knowledge  was  sound  ;  it 
really  is  a  tremendous  adventure  and  a  for- 
midable plunge  into  the  midst  of  an  alien 
people  when  a  Londoner  leaves  London  and 
goes  into  any  of  the  English  counties. 
Frontiers  are  marked  by  diverging  ideals  at 
least  as  definitely  as  by  different  languages 
or  hostile  tariffs.  And  that  London's  ideals 
are  not  England's  is  made  evident  at  once 
by  the  provincial's  scorn  and  suspicion  of  the 
Londoner.  A  Lancashire  man  tries  hard  not 


GETTING  EXPERIENCE  87 

to  grin  when  he  hears  the  filtered  southern 
accents  ;  he  guffaws  openly  at  the  Londoner's 
conception  of  politics  and  commerce.  A 
Yorkshire  woman  confesses  with  shame  that 
her  daughter  deserved  to  be  unhappy,  for  in 
spite  of  the  warnings  of  her  relatives  she 
married  a  foreigner — a  Robinson  of  Camber- 
well.  And  the  natives  of  most  counties 
regard  Londoners  with  a  faint  hostility 
crimsoned  by  contempt.  When  I  was  a  child 
I  thought  Londoners  the  most  ludicrous  of 
beings — not  so  much,  I  think,  because  they 
seemed  quite  hopelessly  ignorant  about  crops 
and  sheep  and  were  afraid  of  slow-worms,  as 
because  I  understood  that  their  lungs  were 
smoke-grimed  and  that  my  own  were  a 
gleaming  white.  It  seemed  such  a  dreadful 
thing  that  their  lungs  weren't  decently  clean 
that  it  followed  quite  naturally  that  their 
ways  and  opinions  were  entirely  idiotic.  I 
think  at  the  bottom  of  the  provincial  distrust 
of  London  doctrines  there  lurks  the  belief 
that  people  who  don't  know  how  to  disperse 
their  own  fogs  cannot  know  much  about 
politics.  In  any  case,  there  can  be  little 
doubt  that  the  provincial  has  to  be  de- 
bauched by  election  frenzy  before  he  listens 
to  a  Londoner's  opinions  with  any  warmer 
feeling  than  one  of  intense  self-restraint. 


38      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

Londoners  are  foreigners,  and  Englishmen 
dislike  foreigners.  Even  people  born  and 
bred  in  the  provinces  become  irredeemably 
foreigners  after  they  have  lived  for  a  few 
years  in  Kensington  or  Golder's  Green.  For 
an  honest  geography  book  would  have  to 
admit  that  London  is  located  partly  in  a  new 
Judaea  and  a  good  deal  in  France  and  to 
some  extent  in  every  other  un-Anglican 
country  in  the  world,  but  never  for  a  moment 
in  England.  And  it  was  just  their  failure  to 
grasp  this  perfectly  simple  and  obvious  fact 
that  made  the  Pankhursts  imagine  that  the 
picture-chopping,  Churchill-flogging,  window- 
smashing  exploits  which  gave  a  tremendous 
fillip  to  London  conversations  would  be  re- 
ceived in  the  provinces  also  with  the  welcome 
reserved  for  a  new  Charlie  Chaplin  film. 

The  constitutional  suffragists  were  never 
guilty  of  quite  so  gross  an  ignorance  of  geo- 
graphy as  was  revealed  by  the  militants. 
They  even  showed  an  exaggerated  regard  for 
small  villages  in  darkest  Oxfordshire.  They 
waded  through  mud  and  spoke  for  hours  in 
the  rain  and  nearly  died  of  pneumonia  in 
their  passionate  desire  to  convert  sleepy 
squires  who  said  that  it  was  all  nonsense,  and 
choleric  vicars  who  thought  women  were  dis- 
gracing their  sex,  and  highly  skilled  hedgers 


GETTING  EXPERIENCE  39 

who,  at  the  end  of  a  speech  on  woman's  work 
in  local  government,  inquired  how  their  own 
position  would  be  affected  by  this  here 
Insurance  Act.  It  was  a  work  not  strictly 
consistent  with  their  own  policy,  which 
located  England  at  Westminster,  but  it  was 
an  inconsistency  overflowing  with  good 
omens.  It  showed  that  though  the  whole 
outlook  of  the  militants  seemed  to  be  warped 
by  bitterness  and  an  astigmatic  loyalty,  the 
constitutional  suffragists  were  still  able  to  see 
that  there  was  work  to  be  done  for  woman 
outside  the  political  struggle.  It  is  true  that 
when  they  talked  of  "  educating  the  elector- 
ate "  they  meant  chiefly  that  the  opinions  of 
men  mattered  to  them  at  the  moment  con- 
siderably more  than  the  opinions  of  women, 
and  that  they  intended  to  devote  themselves 
to  the  task  of  persuading  voters  that  women 
ought  to  be  enfranchised.  But  in  practice 
they  did  clearly  show  that  they  were  con- 
cerned with  far  broader  matters.  The  leaders 
might  fix  their  eyes  on  political  issues,  but 
the  rank  and  file  glanced  hither  and  thither 
at  a  score  of  feminine  needs  that  had  no  real 
connection  with  enfranchisement.  A  gener- 
ous feminism  was  continually  breaking  out 
through  the  tight  bonds  of  their  suffragism. 
They  were  continually  discovering  in  spite 


49     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

of  themselves  that  women  wanted  infinitely 
more  than  the  vote.  And  in  the  last  years 
of  the  pre-war  agitation  there  was  discernible 
among  younger  women  a  growing  doubt  as 
to  whether  the  vote  gospel  were  not  merely  a 
drug  that  was  swallowed  to  still  the  craving 
for  something  vitally  needed. 

Now  although  the  pessimist  may  sit  down 
in  a  heap  and  protest  that  the  whole  suffrage 
campaign  was  dust  and  din  and  profited 
nothing,  the  progressive  optimist  will  find  in 
the  broadening  outlook  of  the  constitutional 
suffragists  not  only  encouragement  for  the 
future  but  also  consolation  for  the  past. 
For  while  the  Pankhursts  and  their  followers 
over-estimated  the  influence  of  London,  and 
consequently  hurled  themselves  and  their 
union  right  outside  the  public  life  of  the 
country,  the  constitutionalists  did  contrive, 
in  spite  of  their  mistaken  belief  in  the 
political  campaign,  to  keep  to  some  extent 
in  sympathy  with  national  thought  and  to 
draw  some  sound  conclusions  from  their 
knowledge  of  it.  If  we  admit  that  the 
agitation  for  the  vote  was  from  the  first  an 
error,  it  does  not  follow  that  no  wisdom  has 
been  gained  from  the  folly  of  its  experience. 
The  worst  sin  is  not  sin  but  the  failure  to 
recover  from  it,  to  embody  it  in  a  career 


GETTING  EXPERIENCE  41 

making  for  usefulness.  The  truce  from 
suffrage  agitation  provided  by  the  war  makes 
it  possible  for  suffragists  to  digest  their  past 
errors  and  build  the  body  of  a  decent  femin- 
ism. And  when  we  are  tempted  to  sprinkle 
ashes  on  our  heads  and  moan  the  suffrage 
years,  it  is  more  seemly  to  remember  that 
without  those  years  women  would  never 
have  gained  a  mass  of  indispensable  know- 
ledge now  theirs  of  the  lives  and  needs  and 
desires  of  their  sex  as  a  whole.  Women 
before  the  twentieth  century  were  boxed 
into  social  classes  and  professions  and  oc- 
cupations. They  were  exceeding  vulgar  and 
genteel.  The  new  fluidity  of  class,  the  new 
good  breeding,  which  are  really  becoming 
fairly  common  among  women,  have  resulted 
directly  from  the  broader  humanity,  the 
wider  comprehension  of  social  needs,  the 
deeper  sympathy,  evolved  by  the  long  cam- 
paign for  enfranchisement.  These  were  gains 
indispensable  as  a  foundation  for  a  reasonable 
feminism,  and  with  them  secured  we  cannot 
for  a  moment  admit  that  the  absurdity  of  the 
demand  for  the  vote  had  no  compensations. 
Without  the  nomadic  life  of  the  suffragists  a 
mentally  healthy  womanhood  could  hardly 
have  been  evolved  from  the  mentally  anaemic 
"  lady  "  of  the  last  generation. 


42      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

Through  the  sin  of  experience  this  stupend- 
ous advance  has  been  made.  Women  have 
arrived  at  a  halt  where  it  is  possible  to  take 
breath  and  prepare  for  a  steeper  climb.  And 
a  careful  examination  of  the  pre-war  mistakes 
and  the  pre-war  achievements  naturally 
makes  it  easier  to  judge  what  should  be  the 
policy  of  feminists  when  peace  once  more 
switches  upon  them  the  limelight.  Before 
the  war  it  was  noticeable  that  there  was  al- 
ready a  rift  between  the  work-dependent  and 
the  communally-supported  suffragists.  The 
former  were  beginning  to  understand  that 
their  deepest  interests  must  in  the  long  run 
clash  with  those  of  their  leaders.  The  class 
war  was  eclipsing  the  sex  war,  and  the  rift 
between  the  classes  can  only  be  widened 
when  the  European  War  is  ended  and  the 
number  of  women  compelled  to  earn  a  living 
is  very  formidably  increased.  There  is  no 
reason  why  the  class  work-dependent  and 
work-tied  should  not  make  use  of  the  class 
communally-supported  and  leisured  to  win 
them  liberty.  But  the  existence  of  this 
hostility  of  interests  in  the  ranks  even  of 
apparently  united  leagues  and  unions  like 
those  of  the  constitutional  suffragists  is 
merely  a  symptom  of  the  existence  among 
women  of  swelling  needs  and  desires  far 


GETTING  EXPERIENCE  43 

mightier  than  the  demands  of  the  political 
feminists  were  capable  of  expressing.  The 
truth  is  that  the  suffragists  were  constantly 
unearthing  needs  which  at  first  they  had  not 
even  suspected.  The  advantages  of  the  vote 
steadily  paled  beside  the  florid  necessities 
which  it  was  powerless  to  satisfy.  And 
although  the  suffragists  went  on  insisting 
that  the  remedy  they  offered  for  woman's 
grievances  was  far  and  away  the  best  remedy 
on  the  market,  the  mass  of  women  began  to 
feel  that  if  there  were  no  better  one  there 
jolly  well  ought  to  be.  One  cannot  say  that 
enfranchisement  would  have  no  effect  upon 
the  economic  position  of  women.  One  cannot 
say  that  it  could  not  be  used  to  better  their 
legal  position.  But  one  can  say  with  a  strong 
conviction  that  since  the  position,  legal, 
economic  and  domestic,  of  women  is  with 
such  infinite  complication  the  result  of  cen- 
turies of  tradition  and  centuries  of  weakness, 
it  appears  in  the  highest  degree  unlikely  that 
the  vote  would  prove  an  adequate  tool  to 
raise  that  position.  The  talent  and  charm 
of  Queen  Tiy  and  the  devotion  of  her  husband 
could  not  raise  her  throne  quite  to  the  level 
of  her  lord's  in  the  estimation  of  tradition- 
bound  sculptors,  and  the  political  recognition 
of  women  in  this  country  will  help  them  no 


44     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

more  than  Hercules  would  help  the  carter  if 
they  have  not  already  by  their  own  efforts 
outside  political  life  broken  down  the  popular 
opinion  of  the  value  of  women's  work  and 
raised  their  position  by  other  means.  When 
they  have  compelled  acknowledgment  of  their 
economic  power,  when  women  employers  on 
the  one  hand  and  women's  trade  unions  on 
the  other  have  become  politically  formidable, 
then  their  entrance  into  political  life  will 
become  inevitable.  But  even  then  the  value 
of  this  political  advance  is  likely  to  be 
swamped  by  a  flood  of  social  problems  of  far 
more  moment  to  women.  For  year  by  year 
the  rapidity  with  which  modern  civilisation 
is  evolved  makes  the  reformation  of  the 
domestic  relations  of  women,  of  their  relation 
to  their  husbands  and  their  relation  to  their 
children  and  their  work,  more  urgently  neces- 
sary, and  beside  this  problem  the  demand 
for  enfranchisement  appears  curiously 
trivial. 


IV 

THE   REDISCOVERY  OF  THE  WORKING  MAN 

EVERY  political  movement  in  Britain  has 
rediscovered  the  working  man.  From  the 
time  of  the  Black  Death  his  economic  value 
has  strained  the  understanding  of  statesmen 
and  capitalists,  and  his  enfranchisement, 
itself  a  tribute  to  his  indispensable  share 
in  the  production  of  wealth,  brought  the 
politicians  clustering  like  flies  about  his  more 
festering  grievances.  Inevitably  he  was  dis- 
covered anew  by  the  suffragists.  And  they 
discovered  him  in  a  new  character.  Other 
politicians  had  been  fluttered  by  his  wrongs 
and  pestered  by  his  wants ;  the  suffragists 
did  not  talk  to  him  about  his  own  troubles, 
but  about  his  Olympian  power  of  helping 
women.  The  traditional  British  workman 
was  transformed  into  a  Perseus,  and  though 
he  was  inclined  to  stipulate  that  his  own  wife 
and  daughters  and  sisters  and  aunts  and  his 
incapable  feminine  cousins  must  on  no  account 
have  votes,  he  decidedly  rather  liked  being 
a  hero  to  other  women.  And  the  suffragists 
45 


46     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

had  such  a  way  with  them  that  there  were 
times  when  he  was  almost  persuaded  that  for 
their  sakes  he  really  would  give  up  all  the 
advantages  which  the  Liberals  were  offering 
him. 

The  militants  soon  lost  interest  in  the 
working  man.  He  was,  after  all,  a  man,  and 
Miss  Christabel  Pankhurst  therefore  regarded 
him  as  a  natural  enemy  and  a  very  shady 
character.  But  the  constitutional  suffragists 
went  on  delighting  in  their  discovery.  They 
specialised  in  the  conditions  of  working-class 
homes,  in  the  food  and  the  drainage  and  the 
rent  and  the  state  of  the  roof  and  the  water 
supply,  and  prided  themselves  on  their  in- 
timate knowledge  of  the  working-class  point 
of  view.  They  formed  an  alliance  with  the 
Labour  Party  and  believed  that  their  united 
forces  would  compel  the  Government  to  give 
the  demands  of  the  suffragists  precedence  to 
Home  Rule  and  Welsh  Disestablishment 
and  even  to  the  European  complications  so 
elaborately  concealed  from  the  electorate. 

But  the  initiative  of  political  reforms  was 
no  longer  with  the  people.  The  days  of  the 
Reform  Bill  riots  and  Chartism  had  given 
place  to  the  reign  of  the  expert.  To-day  a 
new  remedy  for  social  grievances  is  elaborated 
by  Mr  and  Mrs  Webb  and  a  committee  is 


THE  WORKING  MAN  47 

formed  to  boom  it,  and  Sir  Leo  Chiozza 
Money  writes  a  testimonial,  and  by-and-by 
Mr  Lloyd  George  is  pleased  by  the  colour  and 
the  sparkle  of  it  and  goes  to  the  electorate 
protesting  that  he  is  almost  certain  that  it  has 
practically  no  taste  at  all  and  no  unpleasant 
after-effect.  And  the  electorate  swallows  the 
medicine  hopefully  and — calls  in  the  other 
party  if  it  regrets  the  dose  too  bitterly.  The 
Labour  Party  was  regarded  as  a  quack  by 
voters  whose  families  had  been  accustomed 
to  employ  the  same  political  doctor  genera- 
tion after  generation.  A  proposal  for  reform 
that  did  not  come  from  the  Government  or 
from  the  Opposition  Front  Bench  appeared 
to  the  majority  of  the  electors  decidedly 
frivolous.  Quite  often  they  were  willing 
enough  to  give  a  theoretical  assent  to  the 
suffragist  dogmas.  But  it  was  one  thing  to 
sign  a  petition  or  join  a  suffrage  society  and 
quite  another  to  vote  against  one's  party.  In 
those  pre-war  days  every  voter  in  the  kingdom 
might  have  signed  a  petition  for  women's 
enfranchisement  and  it  would  still  have 
been  possible  for  Mr  Asquith  to  lie  low  and 
say  nothing  without  the  smallest  fear  of 
weakening  his  position. 

The  Labour  Party,  in  fact,  was  of  little 
practical  use  to  the  suffragists.     It  is  true 


48     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

that  the  alliance  turned  an  election  here  and 
there,  increased  the  expenses  of  the  Liberal 
Party,  and  bothered  the  party  agents.  But 
every  politician  knew  that  the  suffragists 
could  be  managed  easily  enough  if  only  they 
were  kept  continually  on  the  jump  for  benefits 
just  a  little  above  their  reach.  There  was 
always  some  Bill  to  be  introduced  into 
Parliament  into  which  a  suffrage  clause  might 
be  inserted,  and  there  was  also  the  hope  that 
unflagging  effort  might  build  up  a  Labour 
Party  strong  enough  to  make  the  continued 
refusal  of  Parliament  to  enfranchise  women 
impossible.  In  return  for  these  encourage- 
ments the  constitutional  suffragists  dedicated 
themselves  to  the  service  of  the  Labour  Party, 
and  that  party  very  properly  assumed  that 
even  the  suffragists  must,  if  they  pursued 
their  theories  to  a  logical  end,  admit  that 
it  was  more  important  at  the  moment 
to  make  working  men  powerful  enough  to 
help  the  suffragists  than  to  make  the 
suffragists  powerful  enough  to  turn  and  rend 
the  working  men.  This  would  have  been  a 
good  enough  bargain  for  a  shrewd  suffrage 
leader  if  the  Labour  Party  had  had  capable 
leaders  who  could  secure  popularity.  But 
its  curious  organisation  provided  as  its 
parliamentary  candidates  men  who  were  not 


THE  WORKING  MAN  49 

necessarily  supported  even  by  the  men  who 
nominated  them  in  their  unions,  and  those 
members  of  the  party  who  were  acknow- 
ledged to  be  the  most  able  and  even  the 
most  popular  were  almost  consistently  de- 
barred from  leadership.  This  watered  down 
enthusiasm  for  Labour  candidates  inside 
the  party  as  well  as  outside  it,  and  the 
dearth  of  experienced  organisers  and  skilled 
canvassers  often  made  the  Labour  Party's 
share  in  elections  a  sad  fiasco. 

It  was  here  that  the  alliance  with  the 
suffragists  proved  of  enormous  benefit  to 
Labour.  Women's  reverence  for  detail  and 
their  diabolical  skill  in  election  tricks  and 
evasions  were  just  what  were  needed  by  a 
party  as  careless  as  it  was  unsophisticated, 
and  of  even  greater  value  to  a  party  peculiarly 
prone  to  wrangles  and  vituperation  was  the 
tolerably  high  standard  of  platform  calm 
and  public  dignity  introduced  by  the  con- 
stitutional suffragists.  And  though  the 
popular  hatred  of  militancy  sometimes 
brought  into  disrepute  a  party  allied  with 
suffragists,  and  much  precious  time  had  to 
be  wasted  at  elections  in  explaining  that  the 
suffragists  in  question  were  law-abiding,  I 
think  that  disadvantage  was  outweighed  by 
the  help  given  to  Labour  by  feminine  oratory. 


50     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

It  was  not  merely  that  a  woman  politician 
was  still  a  slightly  mysterious  and  even 
miraculous  apparition  and  roused  curiosity. 
There  was  among  suffragists  a  very  creditable 
level  of  speech-making,  and,  apart  from  some 
of  those  leaders  who  were  Members  of  Parlia- 
ment, it  was  difficult  for  the  Labour  Party  to 
put  into  the  field  at  any  election  more  than 
three  or  four  speakers  who  could  hold  an 
audience  against  the  counter-attraction  of  a 
threatening  Ulsterman  or  a  Nationalist  with 
an  incredible  brogue.  And  in  constituencies 
where  the  Labour  Party  were  as  unknown  as 
the  suffragists  the  tact,  the  wit,  the  personal 
charm  and  serenity  of  many  of  the  latter  often 
secured  a  welcome  for  their  allies  from 
audiences  which  would  have  been  implacably 
hostile  to  a  platform  composed  solely  of 
Labour  men. 

These  were  the  main  advantages  of  the 
alliance  for  the  Labour  Party.  For  its  ad- 
vantages to  the  suffragists  one  must  look 
behind  appearances.  It  was  unpopular  with 
most  of  the  rank  and  file.  It  was  formed  at 
a  moment  of  despair.  Nothing  had  come  of 
the  leaders'  attempts  to  persuade  the  Con- 
servative and  Liberal  parties  to  adopt  the 
suffrage  cause.  The  Labour  Party  seemed 
to  many  the  sole  hope  of  continuance  for  the 


THE  WORKING  MAN  51 

political  campaign  of  the  feminists  ;  in  point 
of  fact  it  was  the  only  veil  remaining  for  the 
inconvenient  truth  that  that  campaign  had 
failed.  But  though  the  leaders  went  into 
the  alliance  eagerly  and  most  hopefully,  it 
was  so  distasteful  to  many  of  the  anti- 
socialists  in  the  ranks  that  in  many  districts 
the  suffragist  speakers  and  organisers  who 
elsewhere  created  an  appearance  of  loyalty 
to  it  hardly  dared  even  to  mention  its  exist- 
ence to  their  supporters.  The  leaders  had 
rushed  the  constitutionalists  into  a  position 
which  might  appear  to  be  an  electioneering 
gain  but  was  certainly  far  in  advance  of  the 
convictions  of  their  followers.  And  for  mere 
beginners  in  politics  the  Labour  Party  was  an 
indiscreet  Melbourne.  Trade  unionism  was 
rightly  its  primary  concern,  and  its  know- 
ledge of  industrial  regulations  was  expert. 
But  no  better  than  an  engineering  expert 
can  wield  the  tools  of  M.  Rodin  could  its 
knowledge  of  industrial  organisation  guide 
its  judgment  when  it  considered  the  organisa- 
tion of  colonies  and  dependencies,  of  foreign 
relations  and  the  Imperial  defences.  War 
compels  the  admission  that  it  would  be  a 
disaster  if  the  control  of  South  Africa  were 
in  the  hands  of  the  existing  South  African 
Labour  Party,  and  when  some  of  the  more 


52     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

able  English  Labour  men,  who  have  habitu- 
ally preached  that  our  House  of  Lords  con- 
sists principally  of  worthless  parasites,  seem 
nevertheless  to  think  that  clean  streets  and 
good  housing  must  evolve  from  German 
workers  a  heavenly  choir,  less  locally  minded 
socialists  reluctantly  perceive  that  English 
Labour  as  a  whole  has  not  yet  outgrown  the 
political  outlook  of  the  town  council.  Closely 
associated  with  the  Labour  Party,  many  of 
the  leading  suffragists  became  tainted  with 
the  belief  that  peace  can  be  maintained  or 
created  by  the  mere  love  of  it.  The  approach 
of  war  found  them  scurrying  like  distracted 
ants  whose  ant-hill  has  been  ruthlessly 
trampled.  There  is  no  reason  to  suppose 
that  the  bestowal  of  the  vote  upon  yet  larger 
numbers  of  peace-lovers  would  have  been  any 
guarantee  of  peace — even  supposing  that  the 
majority  of  women  are  less  eager  for  war 
than  men.  A  complete  democracy  would 
have  been  as  helpless  to  prevent  war  as  the 
existing  andrarchy  proved  itself.  But  a  pacif- 
ism of  the  heart  rather  than  of  the  head  had 
seized  the  emotions  of  many  of  the  suffrage 
leaders  and  had  weakened  their  influence. 
They  had  tried  to  squeeze  feminism  into  the 
uniform  of  Labour  opinions  and  the  buttons 
were  bursting. 


THE  WORKING  MAN  53 

Yet,  though  the  alliance  with  Labour  did 
not  help  the  suffragists  as  they  had  expected, 
and  definitely  injured  them  in  ways  of  which 
they  had  not  dreamt,  its  benefit  to  feminism 
will  probably  prove  real  and  lasting.  The 
rediscovery  of  the  working  man  was  for  the 
constitutional  suffragists  a  very  genuine  dis- 
covery, and  their  research  would  never  have 
succeeded  without  the  alliance  with  the 
Labour  Party.  They  did  not  merely  use  their 
allies  to  further  political  aims  ;  they  formed 
with  them  friendships  which  it  is  no  exaggera- 
tion to  describe  as  a  national  benefit.  For  in 
this  country  class  prejudices  have  always 
been  serious  obstacles  in  the  path  of  progress, 
and  women  more  persistently  than  men  have 
set  them  there.  "  Our  women  cling  to  social 
pride  more  closely  than  do  men,"  warbled  the 
incorrigibly  metrical  soul  of  good  old  Martin 
Tupper  with  that  adhesion  to  platitude  which 
is  almost  always  convincing.  But  their 
social  pride  has  been  languishing  for  years. 
To-day  it  is  amusing  to  hear  of  the  English- 
woman who,  having  been  rescued  from  a 
position  of  some  danger  during  the  Terror 
by  Robespierre,  ever  afterwards  spoke  grate- 
fully of  the  creature  as  "  a  pleasant  young 
man  who  knew  his  station."  It  must  be  rare 
in  these  days  to  find  even  women  who  are 


54     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

more  conscious  of  a  great  man's  origin  than 
of  his  greatness.  Success  in  these  days  stirs 
the  most  worshipping  depths  of  our  snobbish- 
ness. It  is  for  those  who  add  to  the  passive 
sin  of  obscure  origin  the  active  crime  of  per- 
petual absence  from  Who's  Who  that  the 
successful  and  the  unsuccessful,  the  man  born 
in  the  splendour  of  a  soap  king's  palace  and 
the  humbly  cradled  daughter  of  a  provincial 
retail  grocer,  alike  reserve  their  patronage. 
Here  and  there  one  discovers  fragments  of 
the  crumbled  reverence  for  birth.  A  Scottish 
friend  of  mine  who  is  a  chauffeur  confided 
to  me  recently  that  "  he  trusted  he  was  nae 
snob,  but  he  was  fair  ashamit  to  be  seen  wi' 
his  employer's  wife,  for  she  wasna  a  lady." 
But  in  general  the  appearance  of  snub  noses 
among  royalties  and  the  unsettled  contro- 
versy between  heredity  and  environment  have 
destroyed  the  old  belief  in  the  magical  influ- 
ence of  quarterings,  and  the  ideal  of  the 
Lady  has  been  declining  this  long  while. 
What  feeds  snobbishness  now  is  the  unacknow- 
ledged but  quite  prevalent  notion  that  the 
stationary  members  of  the  "  lower  classes  " 
are  people  not  merely  of  straitened  oppor- 
tunities but  of  despicable  aspirations  and  an 
inhumanly  dull  outlook — people  whose  un- 
developed intelligences  are  hardly  potential 


THE  WORKING  MAN  55 

minds  at  all,  since  ability  like  bad  air  always 
floats  upwards.  It  is  a  notion  that  assumes 
that  there  is  a  working-class  point  of  view  of 
public  affairs,  that  working  men  and  working 
women  can  be  neatly  pigeon-holed  as  a  dozen 
definite  types,  that  the  earnest  politician 
and  the  ambitious  curate  and  the  benevolent 
lady  sumptuously  furred  and  hatted  can  learn 
by  district  visiting  all  that  there  is  to  be 
learned  of  the  needs  and  desires  of  an  inferior 
branch  of  humanity.  If  she  were  alive  to-day, 
the  snob  who  patronised  Robespierre  would 
be  proud  to  meet  Mr  Lloyd  George  and  Sir 
F.  E.  Smith,  she  would  listen  to  Mr  Thomas 
Hardy  with  awe  and  to  Maxim  Gorky  with 
animation,  and  Mr  Andrew  Carnegie  would 
seem  to  her  one  of  the  finest  achievements  of 
laissez-faire  economy.  But  on  a  committee 
of  the  Soldiers'  and  Sailors'  Families  Associa- 
tion her  ungovernable  snobbishness  would 
break  out  anew  in  her  attitude  to  women 
and  men  hopelessly  confined  to  the  "  lower 
orders." 

The  quickest  cure  ever  devised  for  this 
modern  snobbishness  was  that  taken  by  the 
constitutional  suffragists  when  they  allied 
themselves  with  the  Labour  Party.  Many  of 
those  who  disliked  the  alliance  found  them- 
selves gradually  forced  into  an  attitude  of 


56     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

comradeship  towards  working  men.  There 
was,  for  instance,  a  fastidious  Anglo-Indian 
fresh  from  the  university  who  nearly  fainted 
with  horror  when  she  found  that  she  was 
expected  to  sit  on  a  Labour  platform  with  a 
working  man  on  each  side  of  her.  Yet  within 
a  year  she  was  revelling  in  the  alliance  and  was 
proud  to  be  the  guest  of  working-class  families. 
And  when  the  tenderly  nurtured  suffragist  who 
had  to  share  a  bed  with  a  hospitable  miner's 
wife  heard  her  hostess  debating  whether  it  was 
necessary  to  wash  below  the  neck  more  than  six 
times  a  year,  she  emerged  from  the  shock  with 
a  fierce  anger  against  that  national  careless- 
ness of  health  which  makes  shirked  cleanliness 
inevitable  in  villages  where  all  the  water  has 
to  be  fetched  from  a  distant  pump.  The  old 
notion  of  some  inherent  difference  in  nature 
between  the  classes,  a  notion  carefully  pre- 
served by  the  Victorian  women,  faded  away 
before  a  growing  intimacy,  before  the  know- 
ledge that  working  men  had  much  the  same 
ambitions,  the  same  discontents,  the  same 
desires,  the  same  longing  to  see  their  wives 
made  beautiful  by  leisure  and  the  skill  of  the 
smart  dressmaker,  as  the  best  of  those  known 
as  their  betters.  Even  such  a  trifle  as  the 
anxiety  of  a  weaver  to  keep  her  shapely 
hands  soft  and  white  and  her  precaution  of 


THE  WORKING  MAN  57 

wearing  gloves  when  she  cleaned  her  loom 
struck  at  the  heart  of  the  old  theory  that 
those  warped  by  toil  should  be  humbly  con- 
tent with  the  warping  conditions  of  their 
labour. 

It  was  the  workers'  surging  revolt  against 
the  denial  of  things  that  make  existence  life, 
their  hunger  for  knowledge  and  their  desire 
for  leisure  and  their  intention  to  have  both, 
that  gave  the  death-blow  to  the  middle-class 
snobbishness  of  the  suffragist.  It  is  true  that 
the  Labour  men  of  whom  they  saw  most 
were  no  more  typical  of  the  working  classes 
than  are  the  Fabians  of  the  middle  classes. 
But  if  many  of  the  Labour  men  were  the 
cranks  of  their  class,  it  was  none  the  less  true 
that  by  breaking  away  from  the  traditional 
acquiescence  in  suppression  they  had  dragged 
into  daylight  some  of  the  potentialities  of 
their  kind.  And  by  making  the  suffragists 
realise  these  things  they  did  more  for  them 
than  their  allies  quite  realised.  Women's 
snobbish  desire  to  cling  to  a  more  prosperous 
class,  their  snobbish  fear  of  openly  rebelling 
against  it,  has  always  been  one  of  the  causes 
of  the  low  remuneration  of  their  work.  Many 
of  them  learnt  from  their  Labour  allies  that 
there  is  only  one  class  division  that  counts  in 
modern  life,  and  that  that  is  one  very  little 


58     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

affected  by  birth  and  education.  It  is  the 
division  between  the  income  that  depends 
upon  an  employer's  caprice  and  the  income 
that  is  dependent  upon  one's  own  enterprise 
and  ability  or  the  enterprise  and  ability  of 
a  husband  or  father  or  other  male  supporter. 
Before  the  war  the  large  number  of  suffragists 
whose  income  belonged  to  the  first  category 
were  steadily  tending  to  make  common  cause 
with  the  more  progressive  members  of  the 
working  class.  And  there  can  be  little  doubt 
that  that  tendency  will  be  yet  more  notice- 
able after  the  war,  when  the  number  of  middle- 
class  women  dependent  upon  employers  will 
be  increased  beyond  all  expectation.  The 
middle-class  dislike  of  trade  unionism  will 
be  crushed  under  the  weight  of  personal 
necessity,  and  middle-class  women  will  join 
with  working-class  women  in  making  women's 
unions  capable  both  of  defence  and  ot 
aggression. 


THE    BREAK-UP   OF   THE    LADY 

THOUGH  from  the  very  beginnings  of  civilisa- 
tion the  lives  of  the  mass  of  women  have  been 
moulded  on  the  ideal  of  the  Lady,  there  has 
never — with  the  sole  exception  of  Madame 
de  Maintenon — been  any  woman  of  dominat- 
ing personality  who  conformed  to  it.  One 
cudgels  history  in  vain  for  some  hint  of  a 
second  lady  among  the  great  women  it 
records.  Cleopatra  drilled  with  the  Roman 
legionaries,  romped  with  Antony  in  disguise 
in  the  slums  of  her  capital,  beat  the  watch, 
drank  as  no  lady  should.  Boadicea  and 
Joan  of  Arc  were  soldiers  whom  no  historian 
has  accused  of  the  conventionality  insepar- 
able from  the  Lady's  disciples,  arid  from 
Messalina  and  the  Byzantine  empresses  to  the 
Dowager  Empress  of  China  great  empress 
consorts  have  been  frankly  adventuresses. 
Isabella  of  Castile,  the  Lord  Kitchener  of  the 
fifteenth  century,  devoted  herself  to  military 
organisation  with  a  vigour  and  ability  which 
our  veneration  for  the  late  War  Secretary 
59 


60      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

forbids  us  to  describe  as  ladylike.  St  Teresa 
in  a  different  sphere  revealed  rather  similar 
qualities  with  a  similar  lack  of  gentility,  and 
not  one  inch  of  our  foul-mouthed  Queen 
Elizabeth  was  a  lady,  though  every  inch  was 
a  queen.  Christina  of  Sweden  wore  masculine 
dress  and  behaved  like  an  Alsatian  bully, 
and  Catherine  II. 's  little  habit  of  removing 
her  enemies  would  surely  have  denied  her  the 
entree  to  the  drawing-room  of  any  lady  that 
really  was  a  lady.  The  name  of  Maria  Teresa 
makes  us  pause  for  a  moment,  but  Maria 
Teresa  was  a  discreet  chooser  of  tools  and 
the  mother  of  a  remarkable  son  rather 
than  herself  a  great  personality,  and  no  one 
since  the  publication  of  her  letters  has  sus- 
pected Queen  Victoria  of  ability.  With  these 
examples  or  warnings  balefully  lighting  the 
pages  of  history,  it  is  hardly  surprising  that 
in  our  own  time  some  of  the  most  carefully 
bred  women  have  shouted  down  Cabinet 
ministers  and  scrimmaged  with  policemen 
at  the  gates  of  Buckingham  Palace.  We  are 
forced  to  conclude  that  there  is  a  natural 
hostility  between  mental  ability  and  the 
ideal  of  the  Lady,  and  that  the  recent  renais- 
sance of  feminine  brains  created  an  unkindly 
atmosphere  for  an  ideal  that  is  cretinous. 
Yet  in  her  prime  the  Lady — delicately 


THE  BREAK-UP  OF  THE  LADY    61 

sympathetic,  alluringly  reticent,  consistently 
courteous  and  skilfully  environed,  lightly  ac- 
complished in  half-a-dozen  of  the  pleasanter 
arts  and  conscientiously  more  beautiful  than 
God  had  made  her — was  an  ideal  altogether 
enchanting.  But  then  so  is  the  lovely 
Circassian,  bred  charmingly  from  her  infancy 
to  be  the  light  of  some  good  man's  harem. 
And  both  are  exceedingly  expensive.  The 
costliness  of  the  Lady  is  one  of  the  chief 
reasons  why  alert-witted  people  should  re- 
joice that  she  is  now  breaking  up.  We  may 
heartily  recognise  that  she  has  been  an 
economic  benefit  in  the  past,  that  her  caprices 
were  an  incentive  to  industrial  enterprise  and 
a  yet  greater  service  to  thought,  that  they 
brought  the  West  into  touch  with  the  material 
and  intellectual  treasures  of  the  East ;  that 
in  its  search  for  spices  and  jewels  and  silks 
and  cosmetics,  commerce  incidentally  dis- 
covered raw  materials  of  infinite  value  to 
industry  and  discovered  also  the  Oriental 
sciences  and  philosophies  which  quickened 
the  slow  wits  of  the  mead-swilling  Europeans. 
We  may  acknowledge  that  society  owes 
gratitude  to  the  Lady  for  helping  the  trouba- 
dours to  create  in  the  midst  of  the  crude- 
ness  of  Western  mediaeval  society  a  decent 
standard  of  manners,  and  for  afterwards 


62     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

maintaining  it.  We  may  admit  that  it  owes 
her  a  yet  greater  debt  for  having  provided  a 
market  for  the  wares  of  the  artist.  But  in 
an  age  when  good  manners  are  fairly  common 
in  most  classes  and  a  love  of  beautiful  things 
is  found  even  in  Bournemouth,  when  there  is 
little  of  the  world  that  is  not  explored,  and 
the  products  of  each  country  are  known,  and 
science  and  commerce  and  art  are  all  inde- 
pendent of  the  Lady's  greed,  society  is  hardly 
bound  to  pension  her  for  past  services. 
Indeed,  society  is  becoming  dolefully  aware 
that  in  these  days  the  Lady  is  an  anachron- 
ism ;  worse,  that  her  greed,  undisciplined 
by  declining  years,  is  a  serious  menace.  The 
Lancashire  mill-girls  who  think  that  no 
woman  can  be  a  lady  if  she  has  a  thread  of 
white  cotton  sticking  to  her  coat  are  essenti- 
ally right ;  the  Lady  never  worked  for  a 
living.  The  power  to  maintain  her  in  luxuri- 
ous idleness  has  always  marked  a  man's 
success  in  finance  or  commerce,  and  the 
immensity  of  her  demand  for  luxuries  has 
been  the  heart  of  innumerable  industrial 
problems.  Behind  all  the  dust  of  the  conflict 
between  labour  and  capital  looms  the  Gar- 
gantuan appetite  of  the  Lady.  "  Gallantry," 
says  Mr  Edgar  Saltus  in  his  Love  Throughout 
the  Ages,  "  was  the  direct  cause  of  the  French 


THE  BREAK-UP  OF  THE  LADY    68 

Revolution.  The  people,  bled  to  death  to 
defray  the  amours  of  the  great,  sent  in  their 
bill."  But  the  respectable  matron  is  often 
no  less  exacting  than  the  courtesan.  Many 
a  well-meaning  employer  must  have  been 
forced  by  the  demands  of  a  costly  wife  and 
costlier  daughters  to  sweat  his  employees. 
Nor  does  the  evil  economic  influence  of  the 
Lady  end  at  that.  In  a  life  whose  labours 
are  the  toils  of  social  entertainment,  she  has 
had  leisure  to  stimulate  her  own  greed  till 
she  has  enormously  increased  the  cost  of 
marriage.  Women  maintained  by  husbands 
and  fathers  have  competed  with  each  other 
in  the  adornment  of  themselves  and  their 
homes  and  the  cost  of  their  entertainments 
till  they  have  made  marriage  a  burden  which 
a  man  hesitates  to  shoulder  in  early  life  ;  and 
if  there  is  indeed  a  formidable  White  Slave 
Traffic  women  should  ask  themselves  whether 
they  have  not  increased  the  demand  for 
prostitutes  by  forcing  men  to  remain  bachelors 
who  in  a  less  extravagant  society  would  have 
been  eager  to  marry.  And  the  most  courtly 
old  gallant  would  find  it  hard  to  deny  that 
supported  women  have  hobbled  the  activities 
of  women  work-dependent  by  raising  the  cost 
of  their  clothes,  perpetually  changing  the 
fashions,  and  demanding  a  greater  attention 


64     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

to  their  wardrobes  than  is  really  consistent 
with  good  work.  It  is  not  merely  because  the 
price  of  food  and  clothes  has  for  many  years 
been  rising,  but  far  more  because  the  Lady's 
caprices  have  continually  increased  the 
sartorial  demands  of  various  social  occasions, 
that  women's  pay  is  becoming  from  year  to 
year  increasingly  inadequate. 

These  crimes  and  the  employment  of  an 
indefensible  quantity  of  labour  in  unpro- 
ductive industries  are  perhaps  the  sum  of 
the  economic  evil  that  the  Lady  has  wrought. 
But  she  has  other  sins  upon  her  soul.  The 
chief  of  them — and  it  is  the  greater  that 
includes  a  score  of  less — is  her  subservience 
to  authority.  It  is  not  at  all  astonishing 
that,  although  Miss  Maude  Royden  and  the 
Church  Suffrage  League  rubbed  the  frigid 
minds  of  bishops  into  a  faint  glow  of 
approval,  feminism  has  been  detested  from 
its  beginnings  by  all  the  slow-witted  folk 
whose  brains  are  frozen  by  an  unreasoning 
veneration  for  Law-and-Order.  For  the  Lady 
was  so  confirmed  a  worshipper  of  this  deity 
that  there  was  born  of  her  a  fiction  that 
to  fail  to  bow  the  knee  before  It  was  un- 
womanly as  well  as  unladylike.  Her  power 
to  enforce  her  conventions  was  always 
prodigious.  The  writer  recalls  how  at  the 


THE  BREAK-UP  OF  THE  LADY    65 

university,  where  it  might  have  been  sup- 
posed that  the  unshackling  of  women  would 
have  been  a  popular  pastime,  women  students 
and  women  dons  alike  lived  in  perpetual  fear 
of  shocking  a  curious  body  of  opinion  vaguely 
known  as  "  North  Oxford."  It  was  never 
discovered  in  the  flesh,  but  it  was  understood 
to  consist  of  the  pussy  element  in  dons' 
wives  backed  by  the  coerced  support  of  their 
husbands.  And  although  it  would  clearly 
have  proved  the  salvation  of  "  North  Oxford," 
though  a  new  liberality  of  thought  might 
have  spread  from  it  to  the  Hebdomadal 
Council  and  in  widening  circles  to  British 
literature  and  politics,  if  women  students  had 
persistently  shocked  that  opinion  every  day 
for  a  term,  it  is  a  dreadful  fact  that  half  the 
delightful  and  natural  and  wholesome  things 
that  every  decently-minded  woman  student 
wanted  to  do  were  forbidden  and  prevented 
by  nothing  on  earth  but  a  cowardly  fear  of 
"North  Oxford."  In  Oxford,  to  be  sure, 
the  Lady  was  incarnated  in  the  exaggerated 
forms  of  mediaeval  society.  But  her  con- 
straining influence  there  is  none  the  less 
characteristic  of  her  pernicious  and  numbing 
effect  upon  the  development  of  feminine 
thought.  It  is  a  just  and  mild  observation 
that  but  for  the  idolatry  of  the  Lady  the 


66     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

chief  battles  of  feminism  might  have  been 
won  long  ago.  It  was  her  snobbishness,  her 
cringing  admiration  of  masculine  achieve- 
ments, her  contempt  for  economic  triumphs, 
that  turned  the  feminist  forces  into  the 
political  quagmire.  It  was  the  desire  to 
retain  her  favour  that  made  thousands  of 
"  gentlewomen  "  content  to  drudge  for  mean 
pay  instead  of  making  common  cause  with 
women  equally  work-dependent  who  had  the 
honesty  to  regard  themselves  as  working 
women.  It  was  the  paralysing  worship  of 
gentility  and  Law-and-Order  that  made  such 
"  gentlewomen  "  refuse  to  have  anything  to 
do  with  trade  unionism.  And  it  is  perfectly 
true  that  the  break-up  of  the  Lady  is  an 
essential  prelude  to  the  economic  advance  of 
women.  There  must  be  in  them  that  robust- 
ness of  mental  fibre  which  the  great  women 
in  history  have  proved  incompatible  with 
gentility  before  their  opinions  can  acquire  a 
driving  force. 

But  the  Lady's  subservience  to  authority 
has  not  merely  prevented  economic  progress. 
It  has  prevented  women  from  taking  the  part 
which  society  has  a  right  to  expect  them  to 
take  in  the  world's  mental  activity.  They 
have,  for  instance,  contributed  practically 
nothing  to  the  world's  moral  thought.  They 


THE  BREAK-UP  OF  THE  LADY    67 

have  warbled  in  the  manner  of  Miss  Ella 
Wheeler  Wilcox  or  moralised  in  the  manner 
of  Miss  Ellen  Key,  but  their  efforts  have 
really  amounted  to  nothing  but  an  echo  or 
an  analysis  of  the  opinions  of  their  favourite 
poets  or  priests  or  professors  or  politicians. 
When  they  refuse  to  worship  spent  traditions 
as  the  Lady  commands  them  to  worship  they 
will  transform  into  a  progressive  force  the 
feminine  opinion  which  is  now  a  dead  weight 
of  conservatism.  A  lady  without  sub- 
servience, without  a  deep  pool  of  stagnating 
prejudices,  without  a  horror  of  natural  im- 
pulses and  a  blood-thirsty,  newspaper-evoked 
desire  to  tear  the  Kaiser  limb  from  limb  and 
a  spontaneous  conviction  that  in  any  strike 
the  employees  alone  are  to  blame,  is  an 
unthinkable  phenomenon.  The  Lady's  pre- 
judices have  always  blocked  the  path  of  the 
reformer.  Loathsomely  she  has  kissed  the 
feet  of  decaying  religions  and  moralities  and 
political  dogmas,  of  putrescent  faiths  of  every 
kind.  She  has  not  known,  or  has  not  cared, 
that  honest,  individual,  continuous  thought 
is  the  only  real  morality,  that  independent 
thought,  independent  religion  or  philosophy 
— whatever  you  prefer  to  call  the  guiding 
rule  of  an  individual's  life — is  one  of  the  most 
urgent  needs  of  modern  existence.  Half  the 


68      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

emotions  of  youth  and  half  its  mental  efforts 
are  often  wasted  in  a  protracted  attempt  to 
fit  into  other  people's  dogmas  because  the 
idolatry  of  the  Lady  proclaims  the  propriety 
of  doing  so,  and  decent-minded  young  women 
frequently  spend  so  large  a  period  of  their 
more  intelligent  years  in  discarding  these 
painfully  acquired  philosophies  that  they 
have  no  time  to  invent  or  deduct  a  satis- 
factory religion  of  their  own.  It  is  only  when 
the  last  remnants  of  their  fervent  devotion  to 
authority  are  destroyed,  and  a  fine  disorder 
takes  its  place  in  their  minds,  that  women  will 
be  capable  of  the  creative  anarchy  which  will 
evolve  a  sane  rule  for  women.  Until  women 
as  well  as  men  are  spurring  unhobbled  minds 
towards  the  wider  knowledge  and  clearer 
perception  which  make  for  an  intelligently 
ordered  community,  there  can  be  no  order 
but  the  order  of  restraint  and  hypocrisy. 

It  would  be  a  shame  in  the  midst  of  a 
Nature  notoriously  thrifty  to  assert  that  the 
activities  of  the  militant  suffragists  were 
entirely  useless,  and  it  is  pleasant  to  be  able 
to  admit  that  their  campaign  undoubtedly 
helped  to  break  up  the  Lady.  By  making 
the  Cabinet  and  the  magistrates  and  the  law 
ridiculous,  by  treating  bishops  with  marked 
disrespect  and  heartily  defying  public  opinion, 


THE  BREAK-UP  OF  THE  LADY    69 

they  did  nothing  to  advance  woman's  suffrage, 
but  they  forced  thousands  of  women  who  had 
never  considered  such  matters  before  to  reflect 
whether  the  law  were  equitable,  whether  the 
Church  were  moral,  and  whether  public 
opinion  really  mattered  a  twopenny  damn. 
And  since  such  reflection  is  a  sword  plunged 
into  the  Lady's  heart,  it  is  an  indispensable 
prelude  to  a  sane  feminism. 


VI 

A   BIRD    IN   THE   HAND 

RECENTLY  an  ex-hunger-striker,  smartly  clad 
in  the  uniform  of  a  woman  constable,  button- 
holed me  on  the  stairs  of  my  club  and  urged 
me  to  proceed  at  once  to  a  meeting  at  which 
Miss  Darner  Dawson  was  to  explain  the  work 
of  the  new  policewomen.  With  precisely 
the  same  fanatical  gleam  in  her  eye  with 
which  formerly  she  implored  people  to  come 
to  hear  Mrs  Pankhurst,  she  assured  me  that 
if  I  would  listen  to  her  chief  for  only  five 
minutes  it  would  be  infinitely  worth  while. 
This  absorption  of  a  militant  suffragist  in 
a  comparatively  narrow  and  unsensational 
work  of  civic  usefulness  seemed  another  proof 
of  the  opportunity  provided  by  the  war  to 
make  feminism  more  muscular.  The  war 
has  headed  the  whole  movement  into  byways 
which  may  yet  prove  a  short  cut  to  the  vote. 
It  has  turned  the  mass  of  feminists  into 
activities  which,  wisely  used,  may,  through 
the  increased  responsibility  which  in  war 
time  is  involved  in  women's  work,  be  an 

70 


A  BIRD  IN  THE  HAND  71 

invaluable  preparation  for  enfranchisement. 
For  some  years  before  August  1914  many 
feminists  had  begun  to  realise  that  there 
was,  after  all,  some  truth  in  the  anti- 
suffragist  assertion  that  suffragists  neglected 
the  powers  and  opportunities  they  already 
possessed.  The  formation  of  the  Women's 
Municipal  Party  was  practically  an  admis- 
sion that  the  agitation  for  parliamentary 
enfranchisement  had  swamped  the  work  of 
organising  and  educating  women  municipal 
voters.  But  it  took  a  duchess  to  make  the 
new  league  popular.  One  of  the  central 
causes  of  the  long  neglect  of  municipal  politics 
was  snobbishness.  Educated  women  disliked 
mixing  with  the  small  tradesmen  who  in 
Britain  form  the  majority  of  mayors,  alder- 
men and  councillors.  And  since  feminism 
in  its  beginnings  was  the  desire  of  a  handful 
of  ambitious,  intellectual  women  for  a  status 
equal  to  that  of  the  men  of  their  own  class, 
it  was  natural  that  these  women  should  wish 
to  meet  educated  men  on  their  own  ground 
— imperial  politics.  Personal  ambition  and 
vanity  and  the  pernicious  influence  of  the 
Lady  combined  to  prevent  them  from  wield- 
ing one  of  the  most  handy  tools  at  their  dis- 
posal to  gain  the  greater  power  they  desired. 
It  is  under  the  sobering  influence  of  the 


72      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

war  that  Englishwomen  of  ability  have  be- 
come less  ambitious,  less  snobbish,  and  more 
public-spirited.  They  have  been  content  to 
renounce  more  sensational  activities  and  de- 
vote themselves  to  humbler  works  which  are 
building  a  far  surer  foundation  for  the  future 
of  feminism. 

The  pre-war  plea  that  women  interested 
in  local  government  found  their  efforts  para- 
lysed by  the  lack  of  the  parliamentary  vote 
was  specious  but  unsound.  It  was  the 
suffrage  movement  that  was  crippled  by  the 
absence  of  any  thorough  organisation  of  the 
municipal  vote.  To  organise  it  with  com- 
pleteness would  have  been  a  tedious  under- 
taking, and  the  organisers  would  not  have 
been  invested  with  any  national  celebrity. 
This  is  not  an  assertion  that  before  the  forma- 
tion of  the  Women's  Municipal  Party  there 
were  absolutely  no  attempts  to  rouse  the 
women  voters  from  their  apathy.  Miss 
Eleanor  Rathbone,  Miss  Margaret  Ashton, 
Mrs  Stanbury,  and  many  other  well-known 
public- spirited  women  devoted  much  of  their 
time  and  ability  to  the  task  of  creating  among 
women  a  deeper  interest  in  local  government. 
Individual  women  had  long  been  actively 
interested.  There  were  women  guardians, 
women  councillors,  earnestly  absorbed  in 


A  BIRD  IN  THE  HAND  73 

their  public  duties.  But  there  was  in 
Britain  nothing  that  in  the  least  resembled 
that  patiently,  minutely  constructed  network 
of  clubs  and  associations  which  has  made  in 
America  a  science  of  women's  local  govern- 
ment activities  and  of  the  suffrage  agitation 
a  broadening  success. 

It  must  be  remembered  that  the  powers 
conferred  upon  women  by  enfranchisement 
in  many  American  states  are  little  wider  than 
those  already  theoretically  possessed  in  this 
country  by  the  woman  municipal  voter. 
But  in  some  states  the  political  power  is 
great  enough  to  enable  them  to  introduce 
laws  of  a  formidable  and  probably  even 
dangerous  character.  They  have  been  able, 
for  instance,  to  pass  a  law  forbidding  the 
issue  of  marriage  certificates  in  cases  where 
either  party  to  the  marriage  is  unable  to  pro- 
duce a  certificate  of  good  health — a  law 
which  bluntly  ignores  the  medical  uncer- 
tainty as  to  whether  the  heritage  of  some 
of  the  most  shunned  diseases  may  not  even 
be  a  mental  stimulus.  And  it  is  generally 
admitted  to  have  been  through  feminine  in- 
fluence that  the  law  was  passed  which  forbids 
a  man  to  travel  with  a  woman  to  whom  he  is 
not  married.  But  however  unbaked  some  of 
the  feminist  legislation  of  the  States  may  be, 


74      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

there  can  be  no  doubt  that,  with  powers 
on  the  whole  very  little  superior  to  those 
of  Englishwomen,  American  women  have 
effected  far  more  important  reforms.  An 
admirable  handbook  recently  published,  Mrs 
Mary  Ritter  Beard's  Woman's  Work  in  Muni- 
cipalities, presents  a  wonderful  record  of  the 
work  of  women  in  American  cities.  With  in- 
finite attention  to  detail  they  have  organised 
to  provide  the  best  conditions  for  infant  wel- 
fare, to  secure  pure  milk,  pure  food,  pure 
water,  clean  streets,  the  abatement  of  smoke 
and  noise,  the  sanitary  removal  and  destruc- 
tion of  garbage,  the  break-up  of  congested 
areas  and  the  improvement  of  housing 
conditions.  They  have  forced  reluctant 
authorities  to  make  artesian  wells  in  dis- 
tricts almost  destitute  of  a  water  supply. 
They  have  compelled  the  provision  of  public 
baths  and  public  laundries.  They  have  intro- 
duced state  pensions  for  poor  mothers.  They 
have  secured  prison  reforms  of  a  revolution- 
ary character.  They  have  had  appointed  in 
connection  with  the  state  schools  visiting 
teachers  to  see  that  the  intelligence  of  the 
pupils  is  not  being  handicapped  by  home 
conditions,  and  vocational  guidance  visitors 
to  direct  the  child  during  his  schooldays  and 
after  he  goes  to  work.  They  have  interested 


A  BIRD  IN  THE  HAND  75 

the  children  in  housing  conditions  and  in  the 
maintenance  of  clean  streets,  and  have  used 
boy  scouts  and  ardent  schoolgirls  to  watch 
for  any  infringement  of  the  housing  laws 
and  to  create  even  in  the  poorest  districts  a 
feeling  that  it  is  bad  form  to  throw  orange 
peel  or  waste  paper  on  pavements  or  road- 
way. No  detail  connected  with  public  wel- 
fare has  been  held  unworthy  of  American 
women's  housewifely  attention.  They  have 
formed  an  "American  Posture  League"  to 
demand  the  healthiest  type  of  desks  in  schools 
and  of  seats  in  street  cars,  theatres,  and  other 
public  places  and  so  secure  "  the  correct 
posture  or  carriage  of  the  body  as  of  funda- 
mental importance  for  health  and  efficiency," 
and  by  their  "  Press  expose  "  of  the  common 
fly  they  left  that  dangerous  insect  without  a 
leg  to  stand  on.  They  have  co-ordinated 
their  social  welfare  activities  by  opening 
bureaux  for  the  collection  and  analysis  of 
information.  And  in  Denver,  two  years  ago, 
they  were  powerful  enough  to  end  a  civil  war 
between  capital  and  labour  by  insisting  upon 
federal  intervention. 

Many  of  these  activities  are  of  a  kind 
already  undertaken  by  Englishwomen.  But 
in  Britain  they  are  not  undertaken  with 
the  same  thoroughness,  precisely  because 


76      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

enthusiasm  for  local  government  exists  here 
only  among  small  groups  of  women.  Among 
us  it  has  not  been  patiently  fanned  and  fed 
till  it  has  burst  into  a  steady  flame.  To  be 
sure,  there  are  half-a-dozen  reasons  for  our 
comparative  indifference.  American  women 
have  not  been  caught  up  as  have  most  public- 
spirited  Englishwomen  into  political  parties, 
and  they  have  therefore  had  more  freedom 
to  combine  for  local  government  purposes. 
And  in  Britain  the  disfranchisement  of  most 
married  women  debars  from  local  politics  a 
great  army  of  capable  women  and  weakens 
their  enthusiasm  for  reforms.  But  the 
suffrage  societies  must  nevertheless  be  blamed 
for  having  absorbed  into  a  movement  which 
accomplished  little  thousands  of  women  who 
might,  through  local  government,  not  only 
have  secured  important  social  reforms,  but 
also  have  immensely  strengthened  feminism. 
The  systematic  education  of  women  muni- 
cipal voters  and  their  enrolment  into  clubs 
and  associations  strong  through  union 
would  probably  have  secured  the  parlia- 
mentary vote  long  ago.  Again  and  again  in 
those  wonderful  times  before  the  war  one 
found  that  it  was  when  suffragists  revealed 
an  intimate  knowledge  of  housing  abuses  or 
the  need  of  local  government  reforms  to 


A  BIRD  IN  THE  HAND  77 

secure  infant  welfare  that  working  men  were 
most  easily  persuaded  to  support  the  demand 
for  women's  suffrage.  Nothing  could  be 
more  convincing  of  women's  fitness  for  parlia- 
mentary enfranchisement  than  a  widespread 
technical  knowledge  among  them  of  such 
questions  as  the  management  of  municipal 
property,  the  principles  of  municipal  taxa- 
tion, the  provision  of  pure  food  and  pure  milk 
at  reasonable  prices,  and  the  principles  of 
town  planning.  There  is  a  fluffiness  about 
the  public  spirit  of  Englishwomen  which 
seems  to  be  quite  absent  from  their  American 
sisters.  The  American  woman  sets  to  work 
in  the  most  practical  way  to  realise  her  ideals . 
Mrs  Beard  tells  us  of  one  enthusiast  who  has 
made  a  practical  study  of  municipal  engin- 
eering, and  of  another  who  in  her  campaign 
for  pure  milk  "  made  a  close  study  of  dealers, 
delivery,  refrigeration,  balanced  rations  for 
cows,  care  of  cows,  process  of  milking,  soils 
in  relation  to  cost  of  production,  and  many 
other  phases  of  the  problem.  She  did  field 
work  as  well  as  laboratory  work,  and  is  justly 
entitled  to  the  name  of  expert."  And  the 
American  woman  who  wishes  to  secure  the 
sanitary  destruction  of  garbage  is  advised 
to  choose  a  bright  spring  day  and  invite 
the  "  city  fathers  "  to  drive  with  her  to  the 


78     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

outskirts  of  the  town  to  look  at  the  garbage 
heaps. 

But  now  that  the  suffrage  agitation  has 
been  shelved  by  the  war,  Englishwomen  have 
in  their  hands  a  profoundly  important  oppor- 
tunity of  remedying  their  past  omissions. 
Intelligent  and  public-spirited  local  govern- 
ment is  steadily  becoming  more  vital  to 
national  welfare.  Under  the  narrowing  in- 
fluence of  war  economy  it  is  perhaps  one  of 
the  few  methods  left  to  us  of  maintaining  a 
decent  standard  of  living.  For  though  up 
to  the  present  it  may  appear  that  that 
standard  has  not  been  perceptibly  lowered, 
it  is  evident  that,  since  any  period  of  wide- 
spread distress  caused  by  the  war  may  very 
probably  begin  with  the  peace,  it  is  likely 
enough  that  the  renouncement  of  pre-war 
habits  of  comfort  will  become  more  and  more 
necessary  among  all  those  classes  which  the 
war  has  not  enriched.  If  the  local  authorities 
follow  suit  and  in  a  short-sighted  passion  for 
retrenchment  curtail  their  public  benefits, 
the  effects  of  this  general  economy  upon  the 
physical  and  mental  welfare  of  the  nation 
may  be  far  from  thrifty.  It  is  to  maintain 
thrifty  methods  of  public  economy  that 
women  municipal  voters  whose  zeal  has  been 
educated  are  more  than  ever  needed  to-day. 


A  BIRD  IN  THE  HAND  79 

No  one,  however,  who  has  canvassed 
women  municipal  voters  in  English  cities 
can  fail  to  know  that  they  are,  on  the  whole, 
unpromising  material.  A  very  large  pro- 
portion of  them  are  widows  bewildered  by 
sudden  accession  to  a  vote  in  old  age.  They 
have  not  been  accustomed  to  take  an  interest 
in  municipal  affairs,  and  they  prefer  to  use 
their  vote  only  at  the  bidding  of  some  male 
relative.  But  this  merely  goes  to  show  how 
widespread  is  the  need  of  a  systematic  civic 
training.  Not  only  the  women  who  already 
have  a  vote  but  all  who  may  some  day  be 
enfranchised  should  be  urged  to  join  non- 
party  clubs  and  associations  whose  aim  is 
social  betterment.  They  should  be  advised 
to  arrange  courses  of  lectures  on  municipal 
economics.  They  should  agitate  for  better 
housing  conditions  and  the  control  of  the 
suburbs  in  the  interests  of  health  and  beauty. 
They  should  aim  boldly  at  Utopian  cities  in 
which  the  streets  will  be  as  clean  as  a  Dutch 
housewife's  kitchen  and  where  factories  and 
warehouses  and  offices  will  all  be  banished  to 
garden  suburbs,  so  that  in  the  clean  and  airy 
central  districts  people  may  live  in  inexpen- 
sive houses  within  easy  reach  of  amusements 
and  educational  centres.  They  should  enlist 
the  enthusiasm  of  children,  as  American 


80     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

women  have  done,  in  keeping  the  streets 
clean  even  under  present  conditions.  All 
over  London  there  are  poor  districts  where 
the  streets  are  strewn  with  paper  and  banana 
skins  and  orange  skins  and  even  with  garb- 
age far  more  continuously  than  the  authori- 
ties can  sweep  them,  and  in  dry  weather  the 
wind  whirls  the  dust  and  rubbish  into  every 
house.  The  women's  local  government  as- 
sociations should  endeavour  to  create  in  such 
districts  a  zeal  for  tidiness.  They  should  agi- 
tate to  prevent  after  the  war  the  restoration 
of  those  electric  sky  signs  which  formerly 
made  a  nightmare  of  the  leisure  hours  when 
cities  should  be  most  beautiful.  They  should 
clamour — as  persistently  as  before  the  war 
women  clamoured  for  the  vote — for  more  and 
better  endowed  municipal  polytechnics,  for 
trade  schools  in  all  our  great  cities,  for  a 
vigilant  care  of  the  nation's  children  outside 
as  well  as  inside  the  schools.  They  should 
interest  themselves  in  the  management  of 
workhouses  and  county  asylums  and  in- 
firmaries, in  the  profitable  organisation  of 
small  holdings.  It  may  be  true  that  their 
public  power  for  good  will  be  vastly  greater 
when  they  are  enfranchised,  but  the  feeble- 
ness of  the  bird  in  the  hand  has  not  been  as 
yet  completely  demonstrated. 


A  BIRD  IN  THE  HAND  81 

These,  then,  are  some  of  the  less  sensa- 
tional activities  which  are  open  to  the 
political  abilities  of  women  even  in  war  time, 
and  it  may  very  possibly  prove  to  be  in  war 
time  that  the  value  of  those  abilities  is  great- 
est. The  men  who  formed  the  rank  and  file 
of  the  most  progressive  movements  have  been 
swept  into  the  army.  They  have  to  rely 
upon  women  not  to  let  those  movements 
perish.  They  themselves  may  return  with 
dead  enthusiasms  and  maimed  ideals.  In 
civic  life,  as  in  the  munitions  factories,  the 
diluting  of  labour  by  women  is  essential  if 
national  prosperity  is  to  survive  the  war. 
To  the  men  who  come  back  with  wounded 
spirits  and  scarred  hopes  women  must  point 
out  the  glory  of  the  old  visions,  and  if  our 
soldiers  return  too  weary  for  the  old  struggles 
women  will  have  to  fight  for  progress  alone. 
But  they  must  organise  now  to  take  their 
part  in  "  the  war  of  all  the  ages."  They 
must  make  themselves  politically  formidable. 
And  the  basis  of  political  power,  even  under 
the  most  centralised  system  of  government, 
is  always  in  the  municipality. 


VII 

SIMPLIFYING   SEX  PROBLEMS 

THERE  was  a  deep  cleavage  among  suffragists 
between  the  old  and  the  young.  The  old 
were  women  who  had  concealed  their  suffer- 
ings in  youth  and  had  nervously  whispered 
their  complaints  in  middle  age,  until  at  last 
they  impetuously  gave  tongue.  They  were 
women  who  might  be  vulgar  for  a  cause  and 
in  the  exalted  spirit  of  martyrdom  (and  quite 
frequently  were),  yet  remained  essentially 
ladies  or  "  ladylike."  Recently  a  young 
Turkish  woman  medical  student  declared 
that  her  modesty  could  never  accustom  itself 
to  the  necessity  of  going  about  London  un- 
veiled. There  was  something  of  this  purdah 
spirit  lingering  in  the  older  suffragists.  It 
was  hardly  possible  for  a  younger  and  more 
natural  generation  to  understand  the  tremend- 
ous courage  that  had  been  needed  before  their 
elders  could  publicly  voice  their  grievances. 
A  gulping  defiance  in  many  of  their  actions, 
a  twittering  eagerness  to  prove  a  neck-to- 
neck  equality  with  men,  demonstrated  still 

82 


SIMPLIFYING  SEX  PROBLEMS     83 

the  conscious  fear  of  unseemliness  in  their 
new  self-assertion,  a  dread  that  after  all  they 
might  regret  the  old  narrowness  of  their 
domestic  seclusion,  might  find  themselves 
too  delicately  fashioned  for  the  jostling  life 
of  a  wider  experience.  And  the  gentility  of 
their  minds  shrank  from  much  that  for  a 
later  generation  was  part  of  the  essential 
tissue  of  feminism.  They  stood  for  freedom, 
for  an  individual  development  strengthened 
by  service,  and  the  pioneers  of  their  move- 
ment had  declared  that  the  path  to  that 
freedom  and  that  development  lay  through 
higher  education  and  political  enfranchise- 
ment. So  the  older  generation  fixed  their 
minds  on  the  vote,  basing  their  demand  for 
it  upon  the  intellectual  ability  of  their  sex  to 
understand  Acts  of  Parliament  and  our  com- 
plicated system  of  local  government.  They 
ignored  with  a  brazen  decorum  the  more 
revolutionary  claims  that  feminism  involved. 
Yet  across  memories  of  suffragist  meetings, 
suffragist  deputations  and  lectures,  street 
rows  and  mass  demonstrations  and  the  de- 
pression of  house-to-house  propaganda,  float 
recollections  of  very  frequent  discussions 
with  older  suffragists  of  the  more  sordid 
problems  of  sex.  There  were  women  who 
pierced  their  veil  of  gentility  with  a  disquiet- 


84      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

ing  hint,  women  who  flung  it  aside  to  display 
a  lamentable  and  astounding  picture  of  their 
married  life,  women  whose  experiences  re- 
vealed a  tragic  misunderstanding  of  those 
kindly-faced  men  who  were  their  husbands. 
And  a  memory  comes  of  a  pallid  invalid  who 
raised  her  head  from  her  pillow  to  whisper 
that  her  wedding  night  had  been  a  dreadful 
revelation  to  her,  and  that  she  would  never 
have  married  if  she  had  known  the  true 
meaning  of  marriage.  She  had  determined 
that  her  younger  sister  must  be  saved  from 
a  similar  ignorance,  and  had  made  a  long 
journey  to  tell  her,  on  the  eve  of  her  marriage, 
"  the  essential  facts."  And  her  sister  had 
passed  a  sleepless  night  and  had  had  hysterics 
in  church  and  had  separated  from  her 
husband  six  months  later. 

These  were  the  women  who  crammed  their 
shelves  with  pamphlets  on  venereal  diseases, 
who  suspected  all  their  male  acquaintances 
of  harbouring  a  venereal  taint,  who  hounded 
on  the  clergy  to  hold  "  purity  "  meetings  in 
every  big  town,  who  collected  stories  of  that 
White  Slave  Traffic  whose  truth  is  now 
buried  fathoms  deep  beneath  a  surge  of 
legends.  These  were  the  women  who  re- 
garded the  majority  of  men  as  conscious  and 
wilful  oppressors,  the  women  who  smiled  with 


SIMPLIFYING  SEX  PROBLEMS     85 

a  tender  gratitude  upon  the  co-educated 
youths  who  confessed  to  them  that  "  men 
were  such  beasts."  They  were  the  women 
who  thought  of  love  as  a  dangerous  explosive 
and  flirtation  as  a  path  by  a  precipice,  the 
women  for  whom  the  beginning  of  war  sug- 
gested principally  the  dreadful  possibility  of 
a  rising  birth-rate  and  who,  with  a  vulgarity 
surpassing  the  unreflecting  impertinence  of 
Maurice  d'Esparvieu's  guardian  angel  in  La 
Revoke  des  Anges,  hurried  into  the  shadowy 
haunts  of  modest  lovers  their  accusing 
flashlights. 

And  then  there  were  the  elderly  and 
middle-aged  spinsters,  and  those  women  who 
before  the  outbreak  of  war  were  classified  by 
the  youngest  suffragists  as  "  the  suffragists 
in  the  thirties."  Many  of  these  were  women 
oppressed  by  an  indecent  modesty.  There 
was  one — typical,  I  think,  of  a  large  section 
of  them — who  declared  that  she  had  never 
married  because  marriage  had  always  seemed 
to  her  a  little  unmaidenly,  and  another  in 
much  the  same  spirit  had  virtuously  avoided 
all  possibility  of  a  proposal  of  marriage  by 
hastily  leaving  a  room  whenever  she  found 
herself  alone  in  it  with  a  man  who  was  not  a 
relative.  Others  were  torn  between  a  rever- 
ent belief  in  a  haloed  maternity  and  a  sense 


86      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

of  some  taint  of  indecency  in  parenthood, 
and  some,  still  holding  these  dreadful 
opinions,  were  eventually  tempted  into 
marriage  by  social  vanity  or  economic  in- 
security. All  of  them — both  the  wives  with 
a  grievance  and  the  complaisant  spinsters 
—believed  very  sincerely  that  marriage  must 
always  be  a  sexual  sacrifice  for  women,  a 
union  which  gives  happiness  only  through 
worldly  comforts  and  motherhood. 

From  all  these  women  the  younger  suffra- 
gists were  definitely  separated  by  sharp  differ- 
ences of  outlook.  They  were  less  certain  of 
the  potency  of  the  vote.  They  were  inclined 
to  value  the  suffrage  agitation  principally 
because  it  provided  a  platform  for  the  ventila- 
tion of  their  own  pet  reforms.  It  advanced 
socialism  or  school  clinics  or  schools  for 
mothers  or  endowment  of  motherhood  ;  soon 
it  would  blast  the  barriers  to  a  freedom  that 
really  mattered.  They  regarded  enfranchise- 
ment as  a  mere  prelude  to  the  feminism 
which  would  secure  for  women  an  economic 
independence  on  which  sexual  independence 
would  naturally  base  itself.  They  saw  that 
sexual  problems  were  the  core  of  feminism. 
They  had  no  desire  to  shirk  their  solution. 
They  had  no  intention  of  hustling  them  out 
of  sight  behind  the  discussion  of  adult  versus 


SIMPLIFYING  SEX  PROBLEMS     87 

householder's  suffrage.  Problems  which  for 
the  veterans  were  the  mere  froth  of  the 
agitation  seemed  to  many  of  the  new  recruits 
its  chief  concern.  Their  attack  was  especi- 
ally directed  against  those  conventions  which 
Mr  Shaw  and  Mr  Wells  had  seized  by  the 
scruff  and  shaken  to  the  glory  of  woman- 
hood. Mr  Shaw  and  Mr  Wells  remained, 
however  involuntarily,  the  apostles  of  the 
new  feminism.  Young  women  at  the  uni- 
versities pored  over  their  works  and  at  last 
came  out  into  the  world  earnestly  convinced 
that  there  was  something  certainly  wonderful 
and  possibly  glorious  about  this  mystery 
called  sex  and  that  it  was  their  business  to 
discover  it.  Usually  they  had  heard  nothing 
about  it  at  home  or  at  school  or  at  college. 
(Perhaps  it  is  hardly  understood  how  little 
the  average  school  or  university  girl  discusses 
such  matters.)  Some  of  them  went  to  the 
British  Museum  with  large  notebooks  like 
those  they  had  been  accustomed  to  take  to 
university  lectures,  and  soulfully  took  notes 
of  books — chosen  quite  without  system — on 
physiology  and  certain  branches  of  medical 
science.  Others  who  were  occupied  in  social 
work  learnt  much  from  the  sexual  woes  of 
the  poor.  And  some  who  still  cherished  a 
university-bred  enthusiasm  for  the  suffrage 


88      TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

cause  discovered  that,  whether  they  sold 
papers  in  the  streets  or  canvassed  house- 
holders or  addressed  meetings,  they  were 
certain  to  have  stories  of  erotic  troubles 
poured  out  to  them  by  suffering  women,  and 
not  seldom  by  men.  Questions  of  sex  were 
continually  dashed  against  their  conscious- 
ness ;  it  was  impossible  to  escape  them.  It 
was  clear  that  they  were  questions  which 
leapt  from  the  widespread  urgency  of  a 
blurred  happiness  and  an  irritating  dis- 
satisfaction rather  than  from  any  flayed 
misery.  But  just  because  happiness  seemed 
so  often  to  have  been  narrowly  missed  by  a 
bumpkin  stupidity,  it  appeared  to  these 
earnest  young  women  their  business  to  dis- 
cover how  this  stupidity  could  be  enlightened. 
Yet  there  lingered  even  among  the  young- 
est suffragists  some  of  the  earlier  prudery. 
Even  among  them  there  were  some  who  saw 
in  sex  nothing  but  degradation  for  women, 
who  thought  love  disgusting  and  the  most 
thoroughly  married  motherhood  a  fall  from 
virtue.  Groping  for  knowledge,  obtaining 
seasoned  instruction  only  from  women  who 
were  embittered  or  cranks,  they  arrived  often 
at  the  conclusion  that  the  honour  of  women 
could  be  maintained  only  by  life-long  celi- 
bacy and  a  stern  rivalry  of  intellect  with  the 


SIMPLIFYING  SEX  PROBLEMS     89 

hostile  sex.  They  tried  to  forget  the  scan- 
dalous fact  that  women  sometimes  bore 
children. 

Hotly  opposed  to  these  extremists  of  the 
right  wing  of  the  new  feminists  were  the  wild 
spirits  of  the  extreme  left.  One  met  them  in 
every  suffragist  league  and  union  and  society. 
In  spite  of  the  reticence  which  hid  their 
opinions  from  the  old,  they  created  a  vague 
uneasiness  among  the  leaders.  To  the 
young  they  were  more  frank.  They  flaunted 
their  insurgency.  The  first  stages  of  ac- 
quaintance brought  the  most  intimate  con- 
fidences. There  comes  a  memory  of  a  fiery 
young  woman  who,  after  a  week  of  indefinite 
and  unrevealing  acquaintance,  gripped  the 
writer's  arm  and  murmured  in  the  most 
thrilling  tones  of  a  rich  contralto  :  "  If  I'm 
co-respondent  in  a  divorce  case  next  month, 
will  you  stand  up  for  me  ?  "  And  she  twisted 
a  glorified  wedding  ring  on  her  fourth  finger 
and  vowed  that  she  was  a  wife  in  the  sight  of 
God.  Yet  it  seemed  that  in  the  sight  of  God 
she  had  been  married  at  least  once  previously. 
There  had  been  tramps  abroad  in  a  heaven- 
observed  union.  She  seemed  to  hold  that 
only  temporary  and  unlegalised  unions  were 
popular  in  heaven.  She  thundered  her  scorn 
of  "  the  mere  trade  union  of  married  women, 


90     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

the  strongest  and  most  anti-social  trade  union 
in  the  world."  There  was  another  young 
suffragist  who  had  a  habit  of  telegraphing  to 
friends  deeply  involved  in  social  or  political 
engagements  entreaties  to  go  with  her  to  a 
play  and  afterwards  upbraiding  them  for 
having  left  her  in  the  lurch  of  a  sin-compelling 
boredom.  And  there  was  one  very  ardent 
and  distinguished  suffragist — an  older  woman 
whose  sympathies  somehow  placed  her  in  the 
younger  generation — whose  flat  was  a  bureau 
of  advice  to  lovers.  There  were  conversa- 
tions there  which  were  a  brilliant  review 
of  the  love  affairs  of  the  young  women  of 
her  circle.  Evenings  with  her  suggested  a 
Salvation  Army  meeting.  In  turn  all  who 
had  been  converted  to  "  free  love  "  testified, 
while  the  unconverted  lighted  another  cigar- 
ette and  greatly  marvelled.  It  was  a  seance 
of  confidences.  There  were  few  questions 
that  were  not  permissible,  few  histories  that 
roused  disapproval.  At  intervals  a  new- 
comer would  introduce  a  friend  to  the  hostess 
with  the  mystic  explanation,  "  She  is  one  of 
us,"  or,  "  She  wants  to  know  about  things." 
And  in  the  firelight  the  ruggedly  respectable 
face  of  the  shrivelled  little  hostess  glowed 
with  the  academic  earnestness  of  her  desire 
to  instruct.  One  learnt  there  that  though 


SIMPLIFYING  SEX  PROBLEMS     91 

the  tragic  end  of  Laura  Grey  might  be  un- 
usual, her  career  was  typical  of  the  lives  of 
large  numbers  of  young  women  of  education 
and  charm. 

But  I  think  the  greater  number  of  the 
younger  suffragists,  the  women  whose  atti- 
tude towards  sex  was  creating  a  new  feminism, 
avoided  rather  remarkably  both  these  ex- 
tremes. They  differed  momentously  from 
the  older  suffragists,  inasmuch  as  while 
enormously  interested  in  aspects  of  sex — 
biological,  social  and  pathological  —  which 
had  been  hid  from  the  sentimental  Victorians, 
the  adventurous  young  were  neither  greatly 
startled  by  those  aspects  nor  greatly  shocked. 
Nor  did  the  new  discoveries  rouse  any  feeling 
of  hostility  towards  men.  They  regarded 
men  as  fellow-discoverers,  equally  blunder- 
ing, equally  uninstructed,  equally  suffering. 
Even  venereal  disease  seemed  to  them  piti- 
able. They  saw  in  the  exaggerated  extent 
of  modern  prostitution  the  delirium  of  a 
system  which  enforced  undesired  chastity 
in  passionate,  respectably  bred  spinsters,  and 
maintained  in  marriage  women  who  by 
nature  or  bad  instruction  were  tempera- 
mentally cold.  The  old  theory  of  an  Eve 
punished  by  God  and  an  Adam  abetted 
by  the  law  found  them  incredulous.  Their 


92     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

observations  convinced  them  that  Nature 
had  established  an  exquisite  balance  between 
the  joys  and  sorrows  and  consolations  of  male 
and  female.  The  inequality  which  existed 
was  a  derangement  of  the  scales  caused  by 
economic  conditions  and  the  makeshift  char- 
acter of  the  marriage  laws.  They  believed 
that  the  suffrage  movement,  officered  by 
university  women,  would  win  a  political 
power  which  would  secure,  if  not  economic 
equality  between  the  sexes,  at  least  economic 
independence  for  women,  and  that  this  in- 
dependence would  establish  in  law  and  in 
custom  that  sexual  equality  which  Nature 
ordained.  They  realised  that  the  existing 
system  doomed  an  unprofitable  number  of 
women  to  celibacy  or  to  an  unsuitability  for 
the  best  drawing-rooms.  It  was  here  that 
their  sympathy  with  the  younger  prudes 
broke  down.  They  saw — naturally  much 
more  clearly  than  the  prudes — why  the  pro- 
ceedings of  the  Laura  Grey  party  were  im- 
moral. A  deliberate  life-long  sterility,  a  half- 
abstracted  promiscuity,  seemed  to  the  main 
body  of  these  new  feminists  anti-social,  not 
merely  because  of  the  refusal  of  motherhood, 
but  far  more  because  by  exaggerating  some 
of  the  body's  needs  these  practices  atrophied 
some  of  its  finest  mental  functions.  There 


SIMPLIFYING  SEX  PROBLEMS     93 

may  be  an  element  almost  inhuman  in  the 
ungratified  constancy  of  a  Petrarch,  but 
when  his  countrymen  stopped  a  battle  to  let 
the  immortal  lover  continue  his  journey  un- 
disturbed by  warfare  they  reverenced  in  him 
that  passion  for  romance  which  is  the  fine 
flower  of  love  and  one  of  the  most  fruitful 
qualities  of  the  intellect.  A  love  in  which 
there  is  no  romance  contributes  nothing  to 
the  world's  inspiration  ;  like  pills  for  bilious- 
ness it  serves  merely  the  bodies  of  the  patients 
who  take  it.  For  though  it  is  true  that  bodily 
health  is  essential  to  mental  activity,  in 
bodily  intimacy  without  mental  sympathy 
there  is  always  an  ugliness  which  destroys 
the  finest  perceptions.  And  it  was  this 
blunting  of  the  mind  that  the  section  of 
young  suffragists  which  had  best  be  called 
the  Centre  perceived  in  the  modern  hetairce. 
The  latter  were  often — perhaps  almost  in- 
variably— women  who  at  first  had  loved  with 
all  their  faculties.  But  it  was  noticeable 
that  the  majority  of  them  had  been  mated 
to  men  who  entered  these  free  unions  in  a 
Piccadilly  spirit  rather  than  in  the  Puritan 
spirit  of  protest  which  these  emancipated 
women  demanded.  Probably  the  rigid 
chaperonage  perpetrated  by  English  girls' 
schools  and  colleges  had  maimed  their  judg- 


94     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

ment ;  the  unchaperoned  girls  of  the  lower 
classes  more  often  choose  their  mates  wisely. 
Certainly  the  first  lovers  of  these  hetairce  had 
often  been  men  unworthy  of  their  sincerity ; 
it  seemed  almost  as  though  society  had  not 
yet  evolved  their  mates,  as  though  civilisa- 
tion had  prematurely  forced  the  development 
of  a  large  class  of  bold-thinking  women  and 
lagged  in  the  shaping  of  their  complements. 
This  misfit  of  love  had  not  merely  caused 
them  a  devastating  suffering  in  the  midst  of 
what  seemed  to  have  been  genuine  love 
affairs ;  it  had  left  them  with  a  sense  of  dis- 
satisfaction and  almost  of  shame  which  gave 
them  an  exaggerated  thirst  for  love.  They 
sought  a  lover  who  would  justify  love  to  them. 
Soon  their  lives  like  their  conversations  were 
obsessed  by  passion.  They  became  erotic. 
It  is  not  good  to  think  of  love — even  of  a  love 
like  Petrarch's — continually.  Love  should  be 
the  secret  and  often  forgotten  mainspring 
of  a  useful  career.  It  is  only  when  it  is  out 
of  order  that  it  arrests  activities.  It  was  the 
collapse  of  their  mainspring  that  sent  the 
lives  of  these  hetairce  sprawling  into  futility. 
Generations  of  bromide  writers  have  asserted 
that  for  women  love  is  a  necessity.  But 
women  far  better  than  men  can  make  shift 
with  philosophy,  and  their  need  of  it  is 


SIMPLIFYJNG  SEX  PROBLEMS    95 

greater.  The  tragedy  of  these  promiscuous 
free  lovers  was  that  many  of  them  had 
no  philosophy.  Christianity  is  a  philosophy 
that  has  consoled  many  disappointed  lovers, 
but  for  the  majority  of  intellectuals  it 
is  discredited,  and  agnosticism  is  not  a 
philosophy.  To-day  all  moral  codes  stand 
naked  before  a  ruthless  criticism,  and  the 
young,  bred  to  an  acquiescence  in  creeds, 
are  suddenly  left  without  authority  for 
guidance.  Here  and  there  appear  sugges- 
tions of  a  new  rule  of  life.  The  Research 
Magnificent,  for  instance,  suggests  as  an  ideal 
an  intellectual  aristocracy  which  even  in  the 
most  torturing  isolation  must  brace  itself 
for  service.  It  preaches  the  necessity  of 
a  religion  individually  created.  The  moral 
collapse,  the  promiscuous,  loveless  passions, 
the  general  messiness  of  the  lives  of  many 
modern  women,  result  from  nothing  on  earth 
but  the  fact  that  they  have  shirked  the 
demand  of  their  souls  for  a  strong  philosophy 
hewed  out  by  sweating  thoughts  to  fit  their 
own  needs. 

When  the  war  is  over,  and  in  an  impover- 
ished England  we  are  stretching  out  our 
hands  for  the  crumbs  of  mental  and  material 
wealth  that  fall  from  the  banquet  of  a  world- 
financing  America,  it  is  possible  that  American 


96     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

feminists  will  furnish  us  with  some  common- 
sense  theories  of  sex.  But,  if  peace  had  con- 
tinued, a  sane  morality  would  have  had  a 
better  chance  of  a  rapid  creation  at  the  hands 
of  the  conscientiously  candid  youth  of  the 
Centre.  This  section  of  the  youngest  suffra- 
gists saw,  in  the  first  place,  the  necessity  of 
reducing  the  mass  of  conflicting  sex  problems 
to  some  degree  of  simplicity  before  any 
solution  could  be  possible.  They  saw  that 
discussions  of  the  White  Slave  Traffic  and 
venereal  diseases  obscured  the  main  issue. 
They  saw  that  the  urban  conditions  of 
modern  life  gave  sex  a  swollen  importance 
which  hampered  the  world's  greater  business. 
The  real  problem  was  how  to  make  the  sex 
instinct  a  source  of  strength  instead  of 
weakness.  When  the  genius  of  a  man  like 
Mr  D.  H.  Lawrence  falls  away  into  a  feverish 
babbling  about  sexual  organs,  when  service- 
ably  witted  women  spend  ten  or  twenty  or 
thirty  years  of  their  lives  in  a  restless  pursuit 
of  love  instead  of  giving  their  powers  to 
useful  activities,  the  social  danger  of  hyper- 
trophied  passion  shouts  like  a  nightmare. 
And  the  battered  marriages  and  the  cowardly 
spinsterhood  of  the  older  suffragists  and  the 
soul-destroying  promiscuity  of  the  new 
hetairce  and  the  literary  failure  of  Mr 


SIMPLIFYING  SEX  PROBLEMS     97 

Lawrence  are  all  part  of  the  widespread, 
stupendous  tragedy  of  an  imperfect  under- 
standing of  the  obligations  and  the  beauty 
of  sex.  The  hetairce  have  done  service  by 
insisting  on  the  need  of  sexual  freedom  for 
women  and  trampling  on  their  elders'  squalid 
belief  in  sexual  sacrifice.  But  the  young 
suffragists  of  the  Centre  were  doing  a  greater 
benefit  by  attempting  to  balance  the  fiercest 
claims  of  the  body  with  the  mind's  ultim- 
ately stronger  hunger  for  romance,  insisting 
at  the  same  time  that  there  is  in  civilised 
humanity  a  social  conscience  which  refuses 
to  love  any  excuse  for  existence  unless  it  is 
the  motive  power  of  work.  And  this  is  the 
problem,  the  fundamental,  ultimate  problem 
of  sex,  which  will  face  the  world  again,  but 
with  a  far  more  pressing  insistence,  when 
peace  lets  loose  anew  the  clamouring  forces 
of  feminism. 


VIII 

HOW   TO    BE   MORAL   THOUGH   MARRIED 

SUFFRAGE  propaganda  was  a  slashing  revenge 
for  the  early  Christian  calumnies  upon  women. 
It  was  man  now  who  was  held  to  be  of  the 
earth  earthy,  tempting  to  destruction  a  sex 
naturally  pure  and  spiritual.  It  was  man 
who  appeared  as  a  wily  serpent,  luring 
woman  away  from  lofty  thoughts  and  snar- 
ing her  into  carnal  pleasures.  Man  was  a 
white-slaver,  a  greedy,  clutching,  oppressive 
capitalist,  a  lover  of  bloodshed,  a  hater  of 
progress,  a  creature  brutish  and  ungodly, 
and  from  the  hell  of  his  tyrannies  and  sensu- 
alities the  new  woman  was  at  last  freeing 
herself  to  redeem  the  world.  She  was  going 
to  revolutionise  society.  Her  confidence 
and  her  inspiration  were  so  strong  that  her 
task  would  have  seemed  easy  if  only  she 
could  have  rid  the  world  of  the  duality  of  sex. 
She  felt,  with  St  Augustine,  that  even  married 
love  is  a  sin,  and  echoed  his  assumption 
that  the  relations  between  the  sexes  would 
have  been  "  courteous  and  no  more  than 

98 


MORAL  THOUGH  MARRIED    99 

courteous  "  if  Eve  had  not  happened  to  care 
for  apples.  Marriage,  if  not  actually  improper, 
hampered  at  least  the  complete  development 
of  the  feminine  mind.  The  new  woman 
gravely  debated  whether  evolution  were  not 
tending  to  eliminate  men. 

She  was  succeeded  by  a  yet  newer  type  of 
womanhood,  which  regarded  feminism  chiefly 
as  an  attempt  to  equalise  the  position  of 
the  sexes — to  put  them,  so  to  speak,  on  a 
pleasanter  footing.  Man,  the  subjector,  was 
regarded  more  amiably  as  man  the  bungler. 
That  two  heads  are  wiser  than  one  was  con- 
tinually put  forward  as  a  reason  why  women 
should  be  allowed  and  encouraged,  even  com- 
pelled, to  help  men  to  reform  society.  It 
was  to  make  the  world  more  comfortable  for 
men  as  well  as  for  women  that  the  status  of 
the  latter  was  to  be  raised,  that  a  larger  life 
was  positively  to  be  forced  upon  them.  But 
in  spite  of  this  difference  in  motive  many  of 
the  newer  feminists  seemed  to  arrive  at  the 
same  conclusion  as  the  "  new  woman  " — 
that  marriage  was  contrary  to  feminine  in- 
terests, and  was  even  intrinsically  shocking. 
It  was  only  when  one  inquired  more  closely 
into  the  grounds  of  this  belief  that  one  dis- 
covered that  it  had  no  real  identity  with  the 
creed  of  the  man-haters.  It  was  backed  by  no 


100     TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

asceticism,  by  no  hostility  to  men.  The 
younger  feminists  were  so  far  from  thinking 
love  sinful  or  unseemly  or  handicapping 
that  they  regarded  people  who  had  never 
known  it  with  the  puzzled  pity  extended 
to  the  half-witted.  They  held  that  such 
cold  natures  were  incompletely  human. 
What  seemed  to  the  new  feminists  shocking 
and  immoral  was  the  existing  institution  of 
marriage. 

One  can  imagine  some  neat  episcopal  leg 
tapping  the  floor  irritably  in  dissent  from 
such  a  statement,  and  the  elder  suffragists 
saying  roundly  :  "  Nonsense  !  "  But  feminism 
came  to  the  clergy  a  little  flat  and  insipid 
through  the  filter  of  the  Church  League,  and 
the  last  people  to  know  the  creeds  of  those 
younger  suffragists  who  before  the  war  were 
making  the  opinions  of  their  own  generation 
were  naturally  their  elders.  It  is  a  fact  that 
the  immortal  indecision  of  Panurge  expressed 
no  greater  fear  of  a  binding  marriage  than  was 
felt  by  numbers  of  intelligent  young  women 
in  the  earlier  years  of  this  century.  Their 
fear  has  been  obscured  to  some  extent  by  the 
recklessness  caused  by  the  war.  But  it  does 
not  follow  that  there  has  been  any  real 
weakening  in  the  belief  that  marriage  must 
remain  certainly  rash,  and  possibly  immoral, 


MORAL  THOUGH  MARRIED   101 

until  the  institution  of  marriage  has   been 
adjusted  to  fit  modern  conditions. 

There  were  two  main  objections  among  the 
younger  suffragists  to  the  traditional  view  of 
marriage.     First,   the  general    one   that   an 
affection  is  not  kept  hot  by  its  own  ardour, 
and  that  a  man  and  woman  may  vow  them- 
selves  black   in   the    face    without   thereby 
guaranteeing  that  the  one  personality  will  not 
outgrow  the  other  within  the  next  five  years. 
Second,  the  definitely  feminist  objection  that 
the  financial  dependence  of   a  wife  upon  a 
husband  is  demoralising  both  to  her  and  to 
society,  and  that  the  home  and  the  family  are 
not  yet  organised  with  a  view  to  making  her 
financial   independence   possible.     This    was 
naturally  the  objection  that  most  troubled 
the  minds  of  the  younger  suffragists.     They 
felt  that  the  economic  position  of  women  was 
degraded  by  the  uncertain  duration  of  their 
work-dependence,     that     their     dignity     in 
marriage   was   compromised    by   their   kept 
condition,  and  that  the  obligation  imposed 
upon  men  of  wholly  maintaining  their  wives 
definitely  injured    society  by  making  early 
marriages  impossible. 

The  preceding  essay  shows,  it  is  humbly 
hoped,  that  society  cannot  afford  to  disregard 
the  criticism  of  the  younger  feminists.  They 


102   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

have  shown  themselves  puritanical  enough 
to  translate  their  opinions  into  actions,  and 
those  actions  have  been  largely  anti-social. 
Courage  and  enterprise  are  qualities  which 
every  nation  desires  to  have  transmitted, 
and  they  were  qualities  which  in  these  women 
were  conspicuous.  Their  scorn  of  marriage 
was  dangerous  to  society  primarily  because 
it  usually  involved  either  a  refusal  of  mother- 
hood or  an  inability  adequately  to  care  for 
their  children.  And  at  a  time  when  war 
conditions  are  bringing  so  many  institutions 
and  customs  into  the  crucible,  it  is  worth 
while  to  consider  why  the  existing  form  of 
legal  marriage  is  to  so  many  women  distaste- 
ful, and  whether  the  causes  can  be  removed. 
Legal  marriage  creates  a  sense  of  mutual 
obligation  and  security  and  social  expecta- 
tion which  a  vast  majority  of  men  and  women 
will  probably  always  value.  But  it  does  not, 
of  course,  follow  that  the  present  form  of 
legal  marriage  is  the  one  which  creates  this 
sense  in  the  most  generally  satisfactory 
manner. 

The  consideration  of  the  question  at  the 
present  moment  is  important  because  the 
universal  economic  uncertainty  makes  it 
more  than  ever  a  hardship  that  a  man  should 
be  normally  expected  to  provide  for  his  wife's 


MORAL  THOUGH  MARRIED   103 

maintenance.  To  be  sure,  great  numbers  of 
married  women  who  would  formerly  have 
been  communally  supported  are  now  working 
outside  the  home.  But  is  this  a  state  of 
things  likely  to  continue  after  the  war  ?  Do 
most  of  these  women  expect  to  be  supported 
with  the  return  of  peace  ?  And,  if  they  do, 
will  not  the  burden  upon  their  husbands  in 
any  widespread  economic  stress  be  one  that 
is  almost  intolerable  ?  In  such  circumstances 
the  young  men  of  the  generation  then  adoles- 
cent will  be  tempted  to  postpone  marriage 
even  later  than  is  at  present  customary — a 
postponement  which  certainly  will  not  make 
for  morality.  On  the  other  hand,  if  it  be- 
comes usual  for  married  women  to  continue  to 
work  for  a  living,  men  may  be  able  to  marry  at 
a  far  earlier  age  than  was  considered  prudent 
in  the  old  days  of  peace.  The  wife  will  be 
able  to  contribute  to  their  common  expenses 
at  least  enough  to  cover  the  cost  of  her  own 
maintenance,  and,  while  the  happiness  of 
individuals  will  be  thus  more  easily  secured, 
the  community  will  be  enriched  (1)  by  the 
increase  of  workers,  (2)  by  the  disappearance 
of  large  numbers  of  the  most  prodigal  patrons 
of  unproductive  labour.  It  is  exceedingly 
wasteful  to  maintain  in  idleness — especially 
when  their  circumstances  are  likely  to  make 


104    TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

them  lavish  consumers — women  capable  of 
increasing  the  community's  wealth,  and  the 
idle  woman  (i.e.  the  woman  communally 
supported  in  such  sufficiency  that  any  occupa- 
tion in  her  home  or  outside  it  is  merely 
caprice)  usually  provokes  and  indulges  in  an 
anti-social  extravagance.  If  the  war  creates 
a  general  opinion  that  it  is  as  despicable  for 
an  able-bodied,  serviceably-witted  woman  to 
be  wholly  dependent  upon  a  man's  earnings 
as  it  is  for  an  able-bodied  man  to  be  dependent 
on  a  woman's,  the  ugly  mercenary  element  in 
sexual  relationships  will  largely  disappear. 
Women  will  no  longer  retreat  into  marriage 
to  escape  from  hard  work  or  economic  in- 
security, for  marriage  will  be  a  part  of  their 
private  life  which  does  not  interrupt  their 
share  in  industry.  It  is  useless  to  pretend 
that  a  woman's  domestic  work  is  the  service 
exchanged  for  her  maintenance,  for  the  less 
she  does  in  the  home  the  more  highly  she  is 
paid  for  it.  It  is  therefore  perfectly  true 
that  the  prosperous  married  woman  at  least 
can  only  be  regarded  as  a  married  mistress 
unless  she  is  self-supporting.  Generations 
hence,  in  quite  different  social  conditions,  it 
may  be  possible  to  estimate  justly  the  value 
of  a  woman's  home-making  labours,  and  it 
may  then  seem  desirable  to  free  her  again 


MORAL  THOUGH  MARRIED   105 

from  outside  work.  But  at  present  it  seems 
unfair  to  deny  a  man  the  autocratic  control 
of  his  household  unless  his  wife  is  financially 
independent  of  his  income. 

Evidently  the  work-dependence  of  a  wife 
is  impossible  unless  (a)  she  is  able  to  earn 
enough  to  pay  people  to  look  after  her  house 
and  children,  or  (b)  her  home  is  so  small  and 
herself  so  expert  that  she  is  able  to  look  after 
it  herself  in  her  leisure  hours,  or  (c)  she  has  a 
very  small  family  or  no  children  at  all.  The 
cumbrous  arrangement  of  most  English  homes 
seems  planned  to  keep  women  occupied 
rather  than  to  make  them  and  their  husbands 
comfortable.  A  complete  reorganisation  is 
necessary  before  the  division  of  a  woman's 
interests  between  her  home  and  her  outside 
occupation  can  work  smoothly.  And  unless 
she  and  her  husband  are  prepared  to  post- 
pone parenthood,  or  ar  least  to  limit  the  size 
of  their  family  in  proportion  to  their  income, 
clearly  earlier  marriage  will  be  a  disaster,  and 
the  work-dependence  of  the  wife  impossible. 
In  England,  however,  as  in  most  other 
civilised  countries,  intelligent  people  are  now 
accustomed  to  regard  the  parents  of  a  large 
family  much  as  an  earlier  generation  regarded 
spendthrifts  addicted  to  gambling.  Even 
among  the  least  educated  of  manual  workers 


106  TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

the  old  child-like  faith  that  a  large  family  is 
the  tyranny  of  God  is  decidedly  weakening, 
and  the  professional  classes  admittedly  in- 
crease their  families  only  when  fortune  smiles 
on  their  finances.  In  The  Times  of  April 
llth,  1916,  a  correspondent  illustrates  the 
inequity  of  the  Budget  by  an  account  of  his 
own  circumstances,  and  remarks  :  "  A  private 
income  of,  roughly,  three  hundred  pounds  a 
year "  (in  addition  to  his  salary  of  two 
hundred  and  fifty  pounds)  "  caused  in  the 
days  of  peace  a  good  many  years  ago  marriage 
and  three  children."  The  next  day  another 
correspondent,  also  to  illustrate  Budget  hard- 
ships, declares  that  in  a  certain  area  he  alone 
of  the  many  prosperous  householders  has  a 
large  family,  and  he  accuses  his  neighbours 
of  selfishness  and  a  lack  of  patriotism. 
Bishops  and  elderly  spinsters  and  the  fathers 
of  sixteen  shake  their  heads  all  over  the 
British  Press.  But  our  alliance  with  France 
forbids  us  to  regard  the  regulation  of  the  size 
of  families  as  a  crime,  and  the  reckless  waste 
of  lives  by  the  German  General  Staff  suggests, 
when  compared  with  the  very  different 
methods  of  the  French  Army,  that  that  nation 
which  cares  more  for  quality  than  for  quantity 
is  likely  to  be  the  more  humane.  Experience 
teaches  more  and  more  clearly  that  the 


MORAL  THOUGH  MARRIED  107 

parent  of  many  is  an  indifferent  parent  to 
all,  that  small  families  are  usually  better 
equipped  for  life  than  large,  and  that  the 
future  of  the  child  depends  upon  the  in- 
dividual attention  given  to  it  in  youth. 
There  is  no  more  devoted  parent  than  the 
sow,  but  she  frequently  tramples  to  death 
one  of  a  large  litter.  Large  families  may 
produce  some  valuable  members,  but  there 
is  usually  more  trampling  than  development, 
and  a  government  is  more  likely  to  be  paternal 
to  a  nation  of  small  families  than  to  a  nation 
so  over-populous  that  individual  lives  are  of 
small  account. 

Feminists,  in  short,  should  be  prepared  to 
face  with  courage  and  sanity  one  of  the  most 
difficult  of  all  the  problems  that  will  follow 
the  war.  Any  considerable  rise  in  prices  will 
be  wholly  incompatible  with  the  maintenance 
of  any  decent  standard  of  living  if  married 
people  are  persuaded  to  return  to  the  old 
English  habit  of  reckless  parenthood,  nor 
will  it  be  possible  for  married  women  to  be 
normally  work-dependent.  It  is  clearly  a 
greater  national  service  to  bring  up  one  child 
in  circumstances  that  will  provide  for  it  the 
best  possible  physical  and  mental  conditions 
than  to  bring  up  half-a-dozen  children  who 
are  physically  or  mentally  underfed.  As  a 


108    TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

nation  we  are  overweighted  by  a  slow-witted 
population  whose  numbers  and  muscles  are 
of  very  little  consequence  in  an  age  when 
shells  matter  more  than  courage,  an  under- 
standing of  chemistry  or  economics  more  than 
distinction  on  the  football  field.  The  birth  of 
a  stupid  child  is  no  benefit  to  the  country ; 
it  is  merely  another  clamorous  stomach. 
English  people  need  to  realise  as  fully  as  our 
French  allies  have  done  that  human  beings 
have  passed  the  stage  when  they  could  beget 
and  bear  children  with  the  irresponsibility  of 
unreasoning  animals,  and  it  is  a  realisation 
which  must  be  shared  with  all  classes.  The 
immoral  prattle  of  pleasure-loving  bishops 
must  be  disregarded,  and  the  high  seriousness 
of  parenthood  openly  preached.  We  must 
get  rid  of  the  old  horror  of  Malthusianism ; 
we  must  denounce  the  spendthrift  creation 
of  families  totally  disproportionate  to  their 
parents'  income.  We  must  declare  that  it 
is  as  dishonest  to  beget  such  families  as  it  is 
to  take  a  house  of  which  one  cannot  pay  the 
rent.  Ignorance  about  such  matters  is  far 
more  immoral  and  harmful  than  an  open 
discussion.  It  is  criminal  to  continue  to 
shut  our  eyes  to  the  fact  that  numbers  of 
respectable  married  women  of  the  working 
classes  permanently  injure  their  health  by  the 


MORAL  THOUGH  MARRIED      109 

use  of  abortifaciants.  Recently  the  writer 
came  across  the  case  of  a  woman  who  was 
dying  as  the  result  of  her  sixth  miscarriage, 
deliberately  caused  by  the  use  of  some  homely 
abortifaciant.  She  had  previously  borne  five 
children,  and  said  that  as  her  husband  earned 
only  thirty  shillings  a  week  she  could  not 
possibly  afford  to  bring  up  a  larger  family. 
She  declared  that  large  numbers  of  her 
neighbours  and  friends  habitually  used  the 
same  kind  of  abortifaciant,  without,  appar- 
ently, injuring  their  health.  But  there  is 
reason  to  believe  that  the  bodies  of  many 
working  women  are  wrecked  by  such  practices. 
Father  Bernard  Vaughan  and  other  celibates 
who  have  shirked  domestic  responsibilities, 
and  the  Anglican  clergy  who  have  too  reck- 
lessly assumed  them,  would  do  a  greater 
service  to  morality  by  preaching  the  necessity 
of  a  decent  restraint  of  philoprogenitive 
instincts  than  by  railing  at  those  who  have 
had  the  piety  to  recognise  that  to  breed 
children  without  the  power  to  provide  for 
them  is  a  blasphemy  of  parenthood.  If  these 
official  moralists  refuse  to  exhort  and  en- 
lighten the  classes  most  ignorant  or  careless 
of  conjugal  decency,  the  task  falls  to  the  sex 
which  more  notably  suffers  through  their 
refusal. 


110  TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

These,  then,  were  for  the  younger  suffra- 
gists the  two  principal  elements  of  matri- 
monial morality — the  recognition  that  women 
must  continue  to  earn  a  living  after  marriage, 
and  the  acknowledgment  that  this  necessity 
is,  for  our  generation  at  least,  so  urgent  that 
maternity  must  be  subordinate  to  it.  It  is 
an  admission  which,  after  all,  involves  a  pro- 
founder  reverence  for  maternity,  and  a  more 
genuine  love  of  children,  than  have  been 
generally  felt  by  their  foremothers. 


IX 


BETWEEN    THE    HOME    AND    THE    LABOUR 
MARKET 

IF  domestic  morality  and  feminine  dignity 
make  it  essential  for  the  married  woman  of 
to-morrow  to  be  independent  of  her  husband's 
income,  and  therefore  normally  dependent  on 
some  occupation  outside  the  home,  evidently 
the  home  must  be  reorganised.  It  must 
somehow  be  made  possible  for  a  woman  to 
combine  the  care  of  her  household  with  some 
paid  profit-making  employment.  Probably 
this  will  be  usually  impracticable  unless  the 
domestic  services  of  large  areas  are  pooled 
and  entrusted  to  a  domestic-service  agency. 
The  agency  would  undertake  to  keep  each 
house  clean,  and  to  provide  luncheon  and 
dinner,  as  the  management  does  in  many 
of  the  more  expensive  London  flats,  but  the 
arrangement  would  be  cheaper  in  the  case 
of  the  agency,  because  its  servants  would 
neither  wait  at  table  (except  for  an  extra 
fee)  nor  answer  doors.  There  is  no  reason  in 
the  world — except  snobbishness  and  sloth — 
in 


112   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

why  able-bodied  people  in  every  class,  from 
crowned  heads  downwards,  should  not  answer 
their  own  door-bell  and  prepare  their  own 
breakfast  and  tea  (aided  by  Princess  Mary  or 
any  other  home-making  daughter),  if  the 
local  housewifery  agents  see  that  the  house 
is  swept  and  scrubbed  and  dusted  and 
polished  in  the  morning,  and  that  luncheon 
and  dinner  are  properly  cooked.  Or  the 
work  might  be  done  more  inexpensively  in 
blocks  of  cheap  flats,  if  the  tenants  fetched 
their  own  meals  from  a  common  kitchen  or 
had  them  sent  up  in  lifts.  And  unless  people 
of  ambition  and  intelligence  but  of  limited 
income  are  to  avoid  parenthood  altogether, 
to  the  great  loss  both  of  society  and  of  lovers 
themselves,  some  arrangement  must  be  made 
to  free  mothers  who  cannot  afford  to  keep  a 
nurse  from  the  necessity  of  attending  con- 
tinually to  their  children.  There  will  have 
to  be  provided  for  all  classes  a  large  variety 
of  creches,  where  small  children  will  be  looked 
after  by  skilled  nurses  during  the  working 
hours  of  their  parents.  There  will  be  more 
beautiful  and  expensive  creches  for  the  more 
prosperous  classes,  but  skilled  nurses  and  the 
necessary  appliances  in  all ;  and  this  arrange- 
ment will  make  it  possible  for  women  to  marry 
without  sacrificing  their  ambitions  or  their 


HOME  AND  THE  LABOUR  MARKET  113 

independence.  It  will  make  early  marriage 
possible  and  natural.  There  may  even  come 
a  time  when  the  gardens  of  women's  colleges, 
such  as  Girton  and  Newnham  and  Somerville 
and  Lady  Margaret  Hall,  will  be  beautiful 
with  the  toddling  babies  of  the  students  in 
residence.  There  will  certainly  be  no  earthly 
reason  why  this  should  not  happen ;  why  there 
should  not  be  a  university  creche  close  at 
hand  if  the  students  desire  it ;  and  why  the 
distressingly  stupid  but  extremely  healthy 
young  women  who  form  so  large  a  proportion 
of  them  should  not  justify  their  existence  in 
the  years  when  they  are  best  fitted  to  do  so 
by  producing  healthy  babies,  in  addition  to 
writing  bromidic  essays.  And  it  is  reason- 
ably to  be  supposed  that  in  women's  work 
as  a  whole  a  higher  skill  will  be  secured 
if  the  work  is  continued,  with  occasional 
lapses  incidental  to  child-bearing,  through- 
out married  life. 

Indeed,  the  removal  of  the  litter  of  super- 
fluous obligations  which  prejudice  and 
obsolete  economic  and  domestic  conditions 
have  strewn  about  maternity  cannot  fail  to 
raise  the  standard  of  women's  work.  First, 
because  the  continued  work-dependence  of 
wives  will  substitute  early  marriages  for  the 
long  period  of  restlessness  which  often  has 


114  TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

disastrous  effects  upon  the  work,  the 
physique,  and  the  philosophy  of  numbers 
of  young  women  who  consciously  or  uncon- 
sciously want  to  be  married.  Second,  be- 
cause an  employment  likely  to  be  merely 
temporary  cannot  be  undertaken  in  a  very 
serious  spirit,  nor  is  the  work  usually  very 
conscientiously  performed.  Women  as  a 
whole  will  be  of  more  value  to  their  em- 
ployers if  new  and  untrained  workers  are  not 
continually  succeeding  each  other,  and  their 
remuneration  will  probably  be  higher.  If  the 
value  of  women's  work  as  a  whole  remains 
disappointing,  its  inferiority  is  not  primarily 
due  to  the  fact  that  much  of  their  work  is 
rotten  with  the  fear  and  diffidence  which 
have  oozed  into  feminine  thought  during  cen- 
turies of  suppression,  and  that  they  distrust 
their  own  abilities  and  shun  originality.  It 
is  not  even  due  principally  to  the  weaker 
health  which  in  some  cases  prevents  them 
from  working  as  continuously  as  men. 
(Their  weaker  health  is,  after  all,  largely  the 
result  of  underpayment.)  The  central  cause 
of  the  disappointing  character  of  their  achieve- 
ments seems  to  be  that  they  normally  work 
for  a  living  only  before  marriage  and  in 
widowhood,  that  in  spinsterhood  most  of 
them  are  restless  with  the  expectation  or 


HOME  AND  THE  LABOUR  MARKET    115 

vague  hope  of  marriage,  and  that  in  widow- 
hood they  have  lost  most  of  any  skill  they 
had  previously  acquired  in  their  trade  or 
profession. 

But  under  present  conditions  it  is  im- 
possible to  assert  with  any  confidence  that 
all,  or  even  a  majority,  of  married  women 
should  remain  in  the  labour  market.  The 
literary  woman,  the  painter,  the  actress,  the 
musician,  the  charity  or  business  organiser, 
the  paid  political  agitator  can  often  do  so ; 
in  some  of  these  occupations  the  work  is  of  a 
kind  which  makes  it  possible  for  a  woman  to 
continue  working  till  within  a  few  hours  of 
the  birth  of  her  children ;  in  most  of  them 
she  can  frequently  earn  enough  to  pay  a  nurse 
and  other  servants  to  care  for  her  family  and 
her  home.  But  the  fortunate  circumstances 
of  the  more  talented  and  better  educated 
women  should  not  blind  them  to  the  very 
different  circumstances  of  many  business 
women  and  manual  workers.  It  may  even 
be  feared  that  by  doing  too  much  themselves 
the  former  may  increase  the  difficulties  of 
the  latter  classes  by  showing  their  husbands 
and  employers  how  light  to  other  women  is 
the  burden  of  motherhood.  It  is  clearly  not 
desirable  that  pregnant  women  should  stand 
all  day  behind  the  counter,  or  toil  in  the 


116  TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

moist,  hot-house  atmosphere  of  a  cotton  mill 
or  the  uproar  of  a  shell  factory,  or  be  em- 
ployed as  chain-makers  or  in  potteries.  But 
to  say  that  women  should  not  be  employed 
during  pregnancy  does  not  involve  the  further 
admission  that  they  should  not  be  employed 
after  marriage  or  until  their  children  are  in 
their  teens.  The  helplessness  of  the  preg- 
nant working-class  woman  can  be  protected 
by  an  adequate  State  endowment  of  mother- 
hood. And  the  imposition  of  taxation  to 
provide  such  endowment  might  be  used  also 
to  make  the  economic  position  of  the  sexes 
slightly  less  unequal.  It  is  useless  to  pretend 
that  the  average  woman  is  ever  likely  to  earn 
as  much  as  the  average  man.  Since  the  war 
began  I  have  again  and  again  been  told  by 
feminists,  gurgling  with  joy  over  the  latest 
news  of  fresh  industrial  openings  for  women, 
that  it  is  a  secondary  consideration  that  long 
hours  and  constant  standing  may  prove  dis- 
astrous to  the  feminine  physique ;  that  the 
fact  for  us  to  grip  is  that  the  war  has  finally 
entrenched  women  in  industry  and  commerce 
and  that  peace  will  be  powerless  to  remove 
them ;  that  if  they  wish  to  receive  the  same 
pay  as  men  they  must  be  prepared  to  work 
as  long  and  as  hard.  This,  so  far  as  it  goes, 
is  reasonable  enough,  but  fortunately  there 


HOME  AND  THE  LABOUR  MARKET  117 

are  now  considerable  numbers  of  feminists 
whose  reasonableness  goes  further — to  the 
point  of  admitting  that  it  is  better  to  be 
healthy  with  a  small  income  than  an  invalid 
with  a  large  one ;  and  that,  as  in  manual 
work  at  least  women  are  not  strong  enough 
to  work  permanently  as  long  or  as  hard  as 
men,  they  must  be  content  with  a  smaller 
income.  Economically  it  is  perfectly  fair,  if 
men  and  women  are  paid  strictly  according 
to  the  value  of  their  work,  that  men  should 
normally  receive  more  than  women,  and  a 
complete  social  justice  would  be  attained  if 
bachelors  and  childless  married  men  were 
compelled  to  contribute  a  fixed  percentage 
of  their  income  to  cover  the  State's  share  of 
the  maintenance  of  the  nation's  children. 
This  tax  would  provide  endowment  for 
pregnant  women  and  nursing  mothers,  in 
addition  to  the  present  National  Health  In- 
surance maternity  benefit ;  and  if  a  medical 
certificate  of  pregnancy  enabled  a  manual 
worker  to  obtain  State  endowment  from  the 
earliest  stages  of  that  condition,  there  would 
be  no  hardship  in  a  law  forbidding  her  to 
work  while  receiving  this  support. 

These  suggestions  obviously  assume  that 
there  is  no  natural  necessity  for  any  very  close 
association  between  mother  and  child  after 


118   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

the  first  few  months  of  infancy.  And,  in- 
deed, it  is  not  mere  moonshine  to  ask  whether 
maternity  really  continues  after  a  child  has 
left  its  mother's  breast.  At  any  rate,  it  is  a 
passionate  relationship  only  while  the  mother 
is  bearing  or  suckling  her  infant.  After  that 
her  feeling  is  one  of  friendship,  if  it  does  not 
degenerate  into  mere  vanity  or  an  exacting 
egotism.  For  clearly  any  devotion  she  may 
afterwards  feel  for  her  child — apart  from  her 
personal  pride  in  having  produced  it — is  a 
feeling  frequently  experienced  by  women  for 
children  not  their  own.  There  is,  therefore, 
no  physiological  reason  why  the  weaned  child 
should  be  tended  by  its  mother,  and  its  health 
will  usually  have  a  better  chance  if  it  is 
handed  over  to  the  care  of  experts.  Most 
women,  like  most  men,  are  exceedingly  fond 
of  children,  but  the  woman  who  really  under- 
stands the  care  of  them  is  no  more  normal 
than  the  man  who  can  create  jolly  games  for 
them.  The  women  who  have  the  natural 
gifts  that  make  them  good  at  tubbing  babies 
and  dressing  them  and  understanding  their 
dietary  needs  and  their  ailments  and  playing 
baby  games  with  them  and  keeping  them 
amused  and  happy  are  so  rare  that  when  they 
are  found  they  ought — instead  of  being 
selfishly  reserved  for  one  family — to  be  put 


HOME  AND  THE  LABOUR  MARKET  119 

in  charge  of  a  creche,  with  dozens  of  babies 
enjoying  life  round  them.  "  Mother  love  " 
often  stands  principally  for  ignorance  about 
diet  and  a  nervous  temper,  and  it  is  always 
an  advantage  to  infancy  when  its  lot  is  cast 
among  experts.  The  advantage  of  being 
looked  after  in  a  creche  would  not  deprive 
a  child  of  intercourse  with  its  mother,  but  it 
would  present  its  mother  to  it  in  the  pleasant 
guise  of  a  playmate  without  nerves  exposed 
by  maternal  cares.  For  mothers  whose  in- 
comes compel  them  to  act  as  nurse  to  their 
children,  the  pleasure  of  motherhood  is  often 
swamped  in  the  exhausting,  irritating,  per- 
petual vigilance  which  cuts  them  off  from  their 
earlier  interests. 

The  truth  is  that  motherhood  is  one  of  the 
most  casual  of  all  relationships  and  one  of 
the  shortest  lived.  It  is  formed  between  an 
adult  woman  and  an  undeveloped  creature 
of  whose  potentialities  she  knows  absolutely 
nothing— worse  than  nothing,  perhaps,  for 
she  usually  assumes  the  existence  of  qualities 
wildly  improbable.  She  is  almost  certain  to 
leave  out  of  account  the  probability  that  it 
inherits  a  big  slice  of  the  personality  of  her 
husband's  detested  spinster  aunt,  and  when 
it  grows  up  a  stranger  to  her  she  weeps  and 
will  not  be  comforted  because  it  bears  no 


120    TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

resemblance  to  some  adored  relative  on  her 
own  side  of  the  family.  In  fact,  maternal 
affection  as  such  is  short,  though  parental 
responsibility  is  endless.  It  is  evidently  the 
lifelong  duty  of  parents  to  make  unlimited 
sacrifices  to  render  tolerable  to  their  children 
the  world  into  which  the  latter  have  been 
brought  by  their  parents'  caprice.  But  there 
is  a  danger  that  many  sacrifices  make  parents 
detestable  to  their  children  unless  those 
sacrifices  are  very  carefully  concealed,  and, 
after  all,  the  average  parents  can  really  do 
very  little  to  ensure  their  children's  welfare. 
Much  the  wisest  plan,  for  a  mother  at  least, 
is  to  be  as  attractive  as  possible  to  her 
children,  and,  for  the  rest,  to  be  content  to 
provide  for  them  conditions  which  are  materi- 
ally and  morally  nourishing  without  strain- 
ing kinship  more  than  that  frail  bond  will 
stand.  For  in  modern  life  the  claims  of  kith 
are  everywhere  becoming  far  stronger  than 
the  claims  of  kin,  and  a  mother's  best  chance 
of  retaining  the  affections  of  her  children  is 
to  present  herself  to  them  as  much  as  possible 
as  a  nice  old  soul  who  is  jolly  to  them  and  as 
little  as  possible  as  a  relative  with  claims. 
The  theory  that  a  child  should  be  grateful  to 
its  mother  for  bringing  it  into  the  world  has 
never  had  much  breath  in  it  since  it  was  so 


HOME  AND  THE  LABOUR  MARKET   121 

thoroughly  shaken  by  Lady  Mary  Wortley 
Montagu,  and  though  the  fiction  was  probably 
a  useful  one  when  children  were  necessarily 
and  properly  dependent  upon  the  care  of  their 
parents,  there  will  be  less  and  less  room  for  it 
in  society  as  the  importance  of  superseding 
parental  by  State  control  is  more  and  more 
realised.  The  realisation  that  it  is  a  national 
waste  to  leave  it  to  parents  to  decide  whether 
a  talented  child  should  go  to  a  university, 
whether  it  should  be  an  artist  or  a  draper  or 
a  doctor  or  a  hospital  nurse  or  a  scavenger, 
whether  it  should  be  made  to  cook  and  scour 
or  be  trained  as  a  musician,  is  three-fourths 
of  the  way  to  the  decision  that  for  the  common- 
weal parental  control  must  be  abolished. 

It  does  not  follow  from  all  this  that  in  such 
a  system  there  would  be  no  place  for  a  home. 
Presumably  there  is  a  home  wherever  two 
people  love  each  other,  and  one  must  be  a 
cynic  indeed  to  think  that  without  the 
fractiousness  of  parent-oppressed  children 
and  without  a  pervading  sense  of  kinship 
stressed  by  reproaches  such  a  place  would  be 
so  pleasant  that  it  would  be  merely  a  hotel. 
The  essence  of  a  home  is  not  the  continuous 
presence  of  children  so  penned  into  the  mono- 
tony of  each  other's  society  that  they  are 
normally  quarrelling.  All  that  is  beautiful 


122   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

in  the  home  would  remain — enhanced.  And 
it  is  likely  enough  that  an  enlightened  society 
will  find  it  desirable  and  possible  very  greatly 
to  shorten  the  hours  of  wage-earning  labour 
for  both  women  and  men,  so  that  parental 
friendship  for  children  may  become  far  more 
complete  and  more  nearly  bi-sexual  than  it  is 
to-day.  The  middle  classes  especially  need 
to  realise  that  nothing  is  more  destructive 
of  the  youthful  soul  than  any  kind  of  home 
influence,  if  that  influence  is  continuous  and 
therefore  narrowing.  Children  should  not 
live  too  much  in  their  parents'  presence,  or 
they  waste  time  by  accepting  their  parents' 
opinions  instead  of  critically  listening  to 
them.  It  should  always  be  the  aim  of  con- 
scientious parents  to  give  their  children  a 
wider  view  of  the  world  than  they  have  them- 
selves been  able  to  attain.  Therefore  it  is  a 
perfectly  respectable  opinion  that  it  may  be 
a  greater  spiritual  advantage  to  be  the  child 
of  a  buffoon  than  the  child  of  a  saint  or 
a  scholar.  For  the  scholar  and  the  saint 
may  dogmatise  and  even  browbeat,  but  the 
buffoon  will  confess  the  insecurity  of  the 
creed  he  is  proclaiming  by  a  sly  wink  or  a  dig 
in  the  ribs.  The  whole  course  of  the  mental 
evolution  of  humanity  cannot  be  repeated  in 
every  lifetime,  and  the  child  who  is  bred  as  a 


HOME  AND  THE  LABOUR  MARKET  123 

little  Glassite  or  Mormon  frequently  wastes 
later  in  sloughing  its  Glassiteism  or  its 
Mormonism  years  which  should  be  profit- 
ably used  for  the  development  of  its  own 
individuality.  The  home  may  be  safely 
regarded  as  a  bracing  retreat  from  the 
world  only  if  the  greater  part  of  the  family's 
time  is  spent  in  the  world ;  otherwise  it 
is  merely  an  atmosphere  which  generates 
cowardice,  ignorance,  and  egotism. 

Children,  therefore,  would  probably  benefit 
very  greatly  by  an  arrangement  which  made 
them  more  independent  of  their  mothers. 
And  since  the  modern  man  evidently  prefers 
the  woman  with  outside  interests  to  the 
woman  immersed  in  housewifery,  it  is  reason- 
able to  suppose  that  the  arrangement  would 
be  a  benefit  also  to  husbands.  Naturally  the 
existence  of  domestic  agencies  will  involve  the 
survival  of  large  numbers  of  women  devoted 
mainly  to  housework  or  the  direction  of  house- 
holds. But  such  women  will  be  specialists. 
There  will  surely  come  a  thrifty  age  which 
will  see  that  it  is  as  wasteful  to  employ  in 
household  work  women  whose  strongest 
talents  are  undomestic  as  it  would  be  to  use 
Mr  Bernard  Shaw  as  a  chimney-sweep,  or 
Mr  Lloyd  George  as  a  scene-shifter,  or  Mrs 
Sydney  Webb  as  a  tea-shop  waitress.  The 


124   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

majority  of  women  will  be  quite  unconcerned 
with  household  matters ;  they  will  merely  give 
their  orders  to  the  domestic  agency  in  the 
morning  and  attend  to  their  own  livelihood. 
As  for  the  argument  that  industrial  efficiency 
demands  the  sacrifice  of  the  cultivation  of 
personal  charm  and  domestic  beauty,  it  is 
one  which  from  time  to  time  has  wrung  bitter 
warnings  from  anti-suffragists  and  silvery 
cadences  of  lamentation  from  sentimentalists 
like  Mr  G.  K.  Chesterton.  But  there  is  really 
very  little  body  to  it.  Work-dependent 
women  whose  labour  is  of  a  wholesome 
character  and  who  earn  enough  to  keep  them 
from  disfiguring  worry,  to  keep  them  well 
nourished,  and  to  bring  the  purchase  of 
becoming  clothes  within  the  scope  of  their 
purses,  are  as  often  attractive  as  the  idle, 
communally  supported  woman.  And  the 
woman  who  lives  only  to  cultivate  beauty 
is  a  luxury  which  the  modern  overworked 
community  really  cannot  afford. 

It  must,  of  course,  be  admitted  that  when 
women  are  earning  adequate  incomes  it  will 
no  longer  be  necessary  or  possible  to  maintain 
so  rigid  a  marriage  law.  If  the  new  condi- 
tions make  early  marriage  possible,  they  will 
certainly  make  easy  divorce  a  necessity,  and 
if  responsibility  for  children  is  vested  in  the 


HOME  AND  THE  LABOUR  MARKET  125 

State  there  will  be  no  occasion  whatever  for 
a  mother  to  remain  with  the  father  of  her 
children  if  she  ceases  to  love  him.  (From 
which  it  by  no  means  follows  that  in  those 
circumstances  it  will  be  invariably  desirable 
that  she  should  leave  him.)  From  the  point 
of  view  of  society  it  will  not  even  greatly 
matter  whether  children  are  legitimate  or 
illegitimate.  It  is  of  no  consequence  at  all 
from  a  civic  standpoint  whether  the  child  of  a 
penniless  tramp  is  born  in  or  out  of  wedlock, 
for  the  sole  importance  of  the  difference  to 
society  is  that  the  legitimate  child  is  sup- 
posed to  be  honourably  supported  by  its 
father.  If  all  children  are  maintained  by 
the  State,  this  importance  disappears.  The 
lasting  advantage  of  a  legal  marriage  is  for 
lovers,  not  for  their  children.  The  chief 
change  in  the  marriage  law  likely  to  be 
created  by  the  changed  economic  relation- 
ship is  the  institution  of  divorce  facilities. 
Divorce  will  have  to  be  granted  on  the  de- 
mand of  either  party — after  a  precautionary 
interval.  To  be  sure,  public  opinion  as  a 
whole  is  still  a  long  way  from  a  belief  in  that 
necessity.  But  British  morality  is  really 
very  adaptable.  That  sinning  hero,  Lord 
Nelson,  guarded  by  British  lions  and  lifted 
high  above  London  as  the  tutelary  god  of  its 


126  TOWARDS  A  SANE    FEMINISM 

public  life,  testifies  that  a  scared  Britain, 
with  the  enemy  at  its  gates,  will  pardon 
many  sins  in  its  public  men,  and  women 
cannot  urge  the  need  of  a  relaxation  of 
admittedly  grievous  bonds  more  effectively 
than  with  a  menacing  hint  of  economic 
power. 


THE    SIN   AGAINST  THE    HOLY   GHOST 

FOR  Christians  the  war  provides  the  dis- 
concerting lesson  that  the  God  of  Battles  is 
a  lover  of  science.  From  the  very  begin- 
ning of  the  war  He  has  been  persistently 
on  the  side  of  mental  exertion.  Always  He 
gives  the  victory  to  the  brainiest  general  and 
the  best  public  financier,  to  the  most  capable 
munitions  organiser  and  the  most  brilliant 
inventor  of  airships.  British  mental  slack- 
ness at  the  beginning  of  this  as  at  the 
beginning  of  the  South  African  war  was 
punished  by  defeat,  and  it  was  by  taking 
thought — not  by  any  increase  in  an  already 
supreme  courage — that  the  Allies  were  at 
last  able  to  turn  back  the  German  advance. 
This  is  a  view  perfectly  compatible  with  an 
enlightened  Christianity,  for  the  most  god- 
like part  of  humanity  is  naturally  its  brain. 
It  is  very  curious  that,  although  omniscience 
is  one  of  the  most  conspicuous  qualities  of 
the  Deity,  it  is  a  quality  which  the  creature 
made  in  His  image  has  never  been  encouraged 
127 


128   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

by  his  priests  to  imitate.  To  be  sure, 
obedience  to  Biblical  commands  and  ex- 
amples has  always  among  all  the  sects  been 
a  little  haphazard.  For  instance,  though  the 
fourteenth  chapter  of  the  Book  of  Deuter- 
onomy directs  the  Chosen  People  to  eat 
pygarg,  one  rarely  meets  a  Jew  who  knows 
what  that  beast  is,  nor  can  the  average  Jew 
define  a  glede,  though  it  is  forbidden  meat  to 
him  and  may,  for  all  he  knows,  be  frequently 
set  before  him  under  some  fanciful  name  in 
his  favourite  restaurant.  But  the  omni- 
science of  Jehovah  is  insisted  upon  in  the 
Old  Testament  far  more  emphatically  and 
continuously  than  the  necessity  of  ritual 
observance.  And  if  it  is  admitted  that 
divine  precepts  are  revealed  through  history 
as  clearly  as  through  sacred  writings,  it  must 
be  admitted,  too,  that  the  present  war  of 
munitions  discloses  the  divine  contempt  for 
an  uninformed  piety.  Even  Mr  Lloyd  George 
appreciates  this  sufficiently  to  ask  for  more 
shells  without  soliciting  prayers.  Unhappily, 
the  outcry  against  "  Kultur "  has  rather 
increased  the  British  scorn  of  knowledge. 
But  the  fact  that  Germans  have  recently 
made  an  anti-social  use  of  their  brains  does 
not  affect  the  truth  that  the  English  neglect 
of  the  mind  is  impious — a  blasphemy  of  the 


SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  129 

powers  by  which  man  most  definitely  asserts 
himself  as  the  image  of  God.  It  is  to  be 
hoped  that  after  the  war  the  churches  will 
preach  that  God  is  a  god  of  brain  power,  and 
is  to  be  worshipped  with  the  sincerest  flattery 
of  imitation. 

British  piety,  in  short,  has  been  seriously 
compromised  by  its  stupidity.  Clergymen 
may  regard  the  war  as  a  scourge  for  whatever 
sins  they  happen  to  know  most  intimately, 
but  its  outstanding  lesson  is  just  precisely 
our  lack  of  information,  our  lack  of  a  sane 
education,  our  neglect  of  our  brains.  Our 
education  has  been  dreadfully  an  academic 
and  non-practical  education,  with  disas- 
trous national  results.  For,  while  civilisa- 
tion is  the  gradual  elimination  of  all  sins 
but  one,  that  one  is  unpardonable.  It  is 
the  depravity  of  mental  sloth,  the  swinish 
stupidity  which  will  never  be  forgiven  Vy  that 
nobler  part  of  humanity  which  is  God, 
because  it  is  the  cause  of  all  social  evils,  from 
wars  to  family  quarrels,  from  prostitution  to 
sweated  labour,  from  a  bloated  passion  for 
personal  elegance  to  a  social  tolerance  of 
company  promoters,  from  matricide  to 
malicious  gossip. 

Let  us  have  enough  dignity  to  admit  that 
Germans  are  right  in  asserting  that  dullness 
i 


130   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

is  the  chief  British  weakness — that  one  or 
two  swallows  like  Darwin  or  Mr  Charlie 
Chaplin  do  not  make  a  summer,  and  that  our 
national  stupidity  has  more  than  once  nearly 
lost  us  the  war.  But  at  a  time  when  educa- 
tional expenses  are  being  cut  down,  when 
mere  boys  are  crowded  into  the  army,  and 
the  best  masculine  brains  have  been  removed 
from  civil  uses,  there  is  little  value  in  the 
admission  unless  the  necessary  work  of 
educational  reconstruction  is  to  be  under- 
taken by  women.  While  the  men  of  Europe 
are  busy  destroying  brains,  the  women  of 
Europe  have  to  save  the  world's  intellectual 
future,  and  it  may  at  least  be  said  of  English 
women  that  they  are,  perhaps,  better  equipped 
for  this  task  than  the  women  of  any  other 
country.  If  they  can  accomplish  it,  if  they 
can  make  use  of  the  leisure  which  still  be- 
longs to  large  numbers  of  women  to  prepare 
the  way  during  war  for  the  reforms  which  the 
jaded  enthusiasm  of  the  fighters  might  other- 
wise be  tempted  to  postpone  in  peace,  then 
they  will  be  doing  a  work  of  more  vital  and 
lasting  service  to  their  country  than  even 
their  patriotic  share  in  the  manufacture  of 
munitions. 

But,  alas !    if  the  average  Englishman  is 
slow-witted,  his  dullness  is  not  a  foil  for  the 


SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  131 

brilliance  of  his  squaw.  It  is,  after  all,  only 
within  the  last  century  that  independent 
thought  has  become  respectable  for  a  woman. 
In  England,  as  elsewhere,  women  in  the  past 
have  been  busy  deadening  rather  than  stimu- 
lating the  mind.  Until  feminism  made  the 
intelligent  woman  popular,  receptivity  was, 
if  not  the  highest,  at  least  the  most  desired 
mental  quality  in  a  woman,  and  a  ready 
welcome  for  facts  and  a  jerry-thought  com- 
prehension of  them  were  valued  in  her  quite 
apart  from  the  ability  to  combine  them 
into  ideas.  Therefore  we  find  the  imitative 
virtues  still  the  most  conspicuous  among 
women,  and  it  is  their  follow-my-leader 
tendency,  the  shirked  responsibility  of  indi- 
vidual research  and  judgment,  which  have 
made  the  feminist  gospel  a  little  tremulous 
and  the  feminist  policy  unconvinced,  uncon- 
vincing, and  neither  democratic  nor  really 
formidable.  Feminism  has  been  lacking,  not 
merely  in  good  leadership,  but  also  in  that 
strong  intelligence  of  the  rank  and  file  from 
which  good  leadership  is  always  ultimately 
evolved.  It  is  this  lack  of  mental  independ- 
ence which  makes  it  questionable  whether 
women  are  capable  of  organising  a  strong 
and  sober  and  intelligent  campaign  to  secure 
educational  reforms. 


132   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

It  is  easy  to  understand  why  women  are 
still  a  little  afraid  of  independence,  why 
the  presence  of  Mr  Walter  Maclaren  and 
Mr  Pet  hick  Lawrence  on  the  Executive  Com- 
mittees of  the  N.U.W.S.S.  and  the  W.S.P.U. 
and  the  formation  of  the  Men's  League 
strengthened  the  faith  of  innumerable 
suffragists,  while  even  the  most  gifted  women 
often  have  more  confidence  in  their  opinions 
when  they  are  backed  by  the  approval  of 
some  commonplace  male.  Women  as  a 
whole  have  no  very  steady  confidence  as  yet 
in  the  mental  powers  of  their  sex.  And  that 
lack  of  confidence  is  explained  by  the  cir- 
cumstances of  modern  women's  lives.  The 
women  who  have  the  fullest  opportunities  to 
develop  their  brains  are  seldom  the  women 
of  the  greatest  mental  ability.  From  those 
centres  of  learning  and  discussion  from  which 
the  leaders  of  women's  movements  might 
naturally  be  expected  to  come,  there  seldom 
come  forth  any  but  second-rate  minds.  In 
Britain,  at  least,  the  most  gifted  women  do 
not  go  to  a  university.  They  develop  too 
rapidly.  They  have  the  vivid  charm  which, 
in  women  no  less  than  in  men,  usually  goes 
with  great  ability.  They  have  the  full- 
blooded  personality  which  makes  a  woman 
marry  early,  and  if  their  mental  powers  are 


SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  133 

used  outside  ordinary  domestic  and  social 
life  they  are  only  indirectly  influenced  by 
academic  traditions.  By  far  the  greater 
number  of  the  most  gifted  modern  women 
have  never  been  to  a  university.  But  when 
this  denial  of  the  finest  feminine  brains  to  the 
women's  colleges  has  been  freely  admitted 
there  remains  some  degree  of  wonder  that 
there  should  be  so  little  distinction — even  of 
a  second-rate  character — among  those  who 
are  actually  sent  to  them.  Our  colleges  are 
filled  with  women  most  of  whom  have  in- 
telligence, some  of  whom  have  talent,  many 
of  whom  have  considerable  personal  charm. 
But  those  of  us  who  have  been  educated  in 
one  of  these  institutions  often  look  back 
upon  the  years  spent  there  with  an  eagerness 
quickly  withered  by  a  conscientious  survey, 
and  try  in  vain  to  remember  any  students  who 
were  possessed  of  mental  powers  which  would 
have  been  conspicuous  outside  their  college. 
In  three  years  spent  by  the  writer  at  some 
ancient  university  or  other  there  seems  to 
have  been  in  her  college  but  one  student  of 
real  brilliance — a  girl  of  genuinely  remarkable 
ability  who  died  before  the  completion  of  her 
course.  For  the  rest,  there  were  students 
delightful  enough  to  survive  the  detraction 
that  their  creeds  merely  reflected  those  of 


134    TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

Mr  Shaw  or  the  Cowley  Fathers,  and  that 
their  thoughts  were  a  gaunt  precis  of  their 
own  bookshelves.  There  were  also  cranks 
who  gave  to  the  college  life  a  flim-flam  flicker 
of  originality.  The  writer  recalls  a  hungry 
poetess  who  paced  the  college  garden  in  the 
small  hours  gnawing  a  hunch  of  bread,  or  was 
discovered  sleeping  on  a  tennis  lawn  in  the 
moonlight  with  a  loaf  among  her  tresses. 
Or  there  comes  the  memory  of  an  economist 
who  found  the  possession  of  a  horse  a  saving, 
because  she  could  pawn  it  in  times  of  stress 
to  neighbouring  farmers.  There  was  "The 
Sporting  Times,"  who  collected  university 
scandals  and  shared  them  with  "ThePink  'Un" 
over  a  contraband  case  of  Burgundy.  There 
was  also  the  anarchist  whose  spirit  was  will- 
ing but  whose  flesh  was  too  weak  to  put 
bombs  under  the  high  table.  There  was  the 
equality-at-any-price  lady  whose  dress  and 
room  were  conscientiously  kept  in  horrible 
and  unsavoury  disorder  because  she  in- 
tended to  marry  some  day  "  a  really  grimy 
working  man."  There  was  the  lisping, 
languishing  enchantress  who  went  elaborately 
garbed  to  Godstow  or  Cumnor  or  Iffley  half- 
a-dozen  times  a  term  to  refuse  offers  of 
marriage  from  King's  Messengers  or  diplo- 
matists or  to  give  the  coup  de  grace  to  rising 


SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  135 

Members  of  Parliament.  And  besides  all 
these  there  were  the  group  of  ardent  meta- 
physicians who  gathered  round  the  noxious 
cocoa  brew  to  consider  whether  transcen- 
dental feeling  ever  illumined  the  heart  of  a 
costermonger,  and  the  pride-of-body  people 
who  were  photographed  in  bath  towels  with 
a  background  of  madonna  lilies.  All  these 
absurdities  seemed  amusing  enough  at  the 
time  and  even,  in  such  restricted  circum- 
stances, a  little  daringly  original.  But  be- 
side the  hair-and-eye  play  and  the  diet  and 
creeds  of  the  supporters  of  The  New  Free- 
woman  or  the  Cave  of  the  Golden  Calf,  or 
even  of  the  frequenters  of  the  Occult  Library, 
their  eccentricities  afterwards  paled.  It 
seems  impossible  to  remember  in  them  any 
signs  of  an  ability  that  considerably  mattered 
or  in  any  degree  redressed  their  pose.  And  it 
is  surely  fair  to  assert  the  probability  that  to 
the  discussion  of  political  and  social  questions 
neither  the  less  individualistic  students  nor 
the  deliberately  eccentric  ever  contributed  an 
original  idea.  Though  both  types  were  almost 
without  exception  suffragists,  they  had  not 
so  much  pondered  as  accepted  feminism. 
By  a  tremendous  mental  upheaval  they  had, 
most  of  them,  rid  themselves  of  their  parents' 
themistes  about  God  and  women  and  the 


136   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

home,  and  on  leaving  the  university  they 
settled  down  with  some  quiet  little  agnostic- 
ism, or  some  academic  belief  in  the  need 
of  divorce  facilities,  or  even  with  some  cool 
little  theory  that  some  form  of  free  love  must 
sometimes  in  some  circumstances  be  per- 
missible, and  they  devoted  themselves  to  the 
world's  hack  work  or  to  its  prodigal  frivolity. 
This  is  no  attack  upon  the  usefulness  of  the 
former  occupation.  It  is  an  attack  upon  the 
merely  temporary  exercise  of  reason.  For 
to  an  active  mind  agnosticism  can  be  only  a 
stage  on  the  way  to  a  creative  philosophy,  a 
belief  in  free  love  but  a  step  towards  the  con- 
viction that  humanity  keeps  its  moral  health 
only  by  the  reasonable  monogamy  of  com- 
patibilities. But  most  of  these  women  ar- 
rived at  agnosticism  or  at  a  thin  shudder 
at  the  marriage  law  simply  because  the 
university  traditions  appeared  to  hold  it  un- 
cultured to  leave  such  matters  unconsidered. 
They  had  put  aside  out  of  their  lives  these 
three  or  four  years  for  steady  thought  and 
for  the  formation  of  opinions.  The  effort 
was  too  unwonted,  too  alien  from  their  earlier 
training,  to  be  repeated.  Most  of  them  in- 
tended to  keep  their  university  opinions  as 
sacred  icons  commanding  their  lifelong  genu- 
flection. And  since  there  was  neither  time 


SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  137 

nor  energy  left  over  for  honest  reflection  on 
feminism,  it  is  not  in  the  least  astonishing 
that  university  women  have  merely  followed 
the  suffrage  leaders  with  an  indiscriminating 
loyalty.  So  that  even  with  regard  to  those 
questions  of  the  feminine  status  and  the 
feminine  sphere  which  might  most  reason- 
ably have  been  expected  to  rouse  in  them 
some  independence  of  thought,  there  has 
been  found  in  these  women  the  old  tendency 
to  defer  to  an  outside  opinion  too  hastily 
accepted  as  expert. 

No  doubt  one  cause  of  this  obstinate  habit 
of  docility  can  be  rooted  out  of  the  discipline 
common  to  almost  all  girls'  schools,  where 
girls  are  drilled  into  acquiescence  long  before 
they  arrive  at  the  universities.  Able  women 
generally  admit  that  they  were  profoundly 
bored  in  their  schooldays,  and  on  less  brilliant 
people  the  boredom  often  leaves  its  mark  in  a 
lasting  apathy.  Any  originality  there  may 
be  in  the  teachers  is  usually  quickly  trodden 
underfoot  on  the  school  curriculum,  and  the 
brighter  gleams  in  their  pupils  flicker  out 
in  a  murk  of  conventionality  and  extorted 
acquiescence.  Worse  still,  across  any  minds 
whose  individuality  survives  the  system 
there  sprawls  almost  inevitably  an  obscene 
and  degrading  vanity.  But  the  discipline 


138    TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

in  girls'  schools  is  itself  the  result  of  the  Great 
Domestic  Cant  of  Good  Wifehood  and  Good 
Motherhood.  It  is  in  order  that  she  may  some 
day  be  a  "good  wife"  and  a  "good  mother" 
that  the  schoolgirl  is  reproved  when  her  con- 
duct is  unworthy  of  a  lady  ;  it  is  in  deference 
to  the  Great  Domestic  Cant  that  she  is  for- 
bidden to  be  natural.  And  it  is  precisely 
this  cant  that  sooner  or  later  so  frequently 
stifles  the  minds  of  those  more  able  women 
who  do  not  go  to  the  universities.  Even 
under  the  existing  organisation  of  the  family, 
there  is  no  reason  on  earth  why  a  woman  of 
sound  mind  and  sound  constitution  should 
not  be  able  to  combine  some  out-of-the-home 
career  with  marriage  and  motherhood  and 
the  orderly  management  of  her  household. 
Unless  the  size  of  her  house  or  her  family  is 
extravagantly  disproportionate  to  her  in- 
come, the  direction  of  her  home  ought  to 
leave  any  woman  who  is  not  notably  cretin- 
ous with  ample  time  for  the  exercise  and 
development  of  her  wits.  The  housewife  can 
usually  arrange  to  have  more  leisure  for  such 
employment  than  the  professional  or  business 
woman,  and  for  the  former  it  need  not  be  the 
end-of-the-day  leisure  of  a  mind  and  body 
exhausted.  But  the  Great  Domestic  Cant  of 
Good  Wifehood  and  Good  Motherhood  has 


SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  139 

tied  the  average  married  woman  into  such  a 
tangle  of  hypocrisies  that  she  cannot  unravel 
herself  sufficiently  to  be  a  distinct  personality. 
She  cannot  be  herself — a  natural  woman 
naturally  loving  her  husband  and  enjoying  an 
unaffected  maternity.  She  has  instead  to  be 
continually  a  Good  Wife  and  a  Good  Mother. 
At  the  very  beginning  of  her  engagement 
her  parents  probably  shadow  her  happiness 
by  expressing  a  hope  that  she  will  be  a  Good 
Wife,  that  the  man  she  is  going  to  marry  will 
be  a  good  husband.  When  the  honeymoon 
is  over  she  hurriedly  becomes  a  domestic 
martyr.  Before  long  she  is  exhausted  by 
hypocrisy.  Her  self-distrust  lashes  her  to  a 
duster,  her  determination  to  appear  what  she 
is  not  is  a  magnet  that  keeps  her  inextricably 
fastened  to  her  servants  or  her  cooking  stove, 
her  nursery  or  her  dreary  round  of  afternoon 
visits  and  uncongenial  dinner-parties,  her 
needle  or  her  church.  She  fusses  and  fumes 
in  her  anxiety  to  be  a  little  pocket  saint  to 
her  husband  and  children.  Her  nerves  are 
racked  by  the  effort  to  live  up  to  the  Good 
Mother  ideal.  There  is  no  fun  left  in  her. 
She  accepts  motherhood  in  a  spirit  of  immo- 
lation and  sadly  braces  herself  to  meet  its 
claims,  instead  of  rejoicing  in  it  with  a  godly 
simplicity  and  being  a  jolly  comrade  to  her 


140   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

children.  A  mother  who  amuses  her  children 
in  their  teens  holds  their  allegiance  for  life. 
But  a  vast  majority  of  children  are  im- 
measurably bored  by  their  mothers  because 
the  latter  are  so  wearisomely  and  consciously 
good.  Because  there  is  more  cant  about 
Good  Motherhood  than  about  Good  Father- 
hood, children  are  usually  more  bored  by 
their  posturing  mothers  than  by  their  male 
parents,  who  are  frequently  quite  content  to 
let  their  personality  appear  at  home  in  un- 
dress uniform.  The  undesired  and  insuffer- 
ably conscious  sacrifices  which  fatten  the 
vanity  of  a  great  army  of  mothers  are  sel- 
dom a  lasting  benefit  to  their  children,  and 
are  almost  always  an  irritation.  There  are 
mothers  who  make  a  point,  when  they  are  ill, 
of  performing  easily  dispensable  tasks  which 
do  not  really  fall  to  their  lot  even  when  they 
are  well,  in  order  that  their  devotion  to  their 
children  may  be  more  effectively  staged.  Or 
they  will  perform  genuine  services  with 
sighs  and  complaints  which  pervert  them 
into  an  injury.  Quite  frequently  it  happens 
that  all  the  beauty  of  motherhood  lies 
draggled  in  the  mud  of  renunciation.  Be- 
cause Puritanism  took  a  sensual  pleasure  hi 
sacrifice,  a  relationship  which  is  naturally  a 
very  pleasant  one  has  been  starved  and 


SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  141 

disciplined  till  it  is  often  little  better  than 
sacred. 

With  our  educational  system  subduing  the 
intelligence  of  the  less  able  women,  and 
the  Great  Domestic  Cant  weighing  down  the 
powers  of  the  more  brilliant  under  an  absurdly 
complicated  organisation  of  the  family,  there 
remains  no  cause  for  wonder  that  in  spite 
of  higher  education,  in  spite  of  feminism, 
original  thought  among  women  is  almost 
non-existent.  The  rough-and-tumble  of 
suffrage  experience  certainly  did  much  to 
quicken  the  wits  of  the  women  who  actually 
took  part  in  it.  It  was  forming  in  them 
the  rudiments  of  an  independent  judgment. 
But  even  among  suffragists — and  perhaps 
conspicuously  among  them — a  healthy  scorn 
of  second  -  hand  opinions  wras  lacking. 
Heaven  forbid  that  any  abuse  should  be 
hurled  at  the  habit  of  cocking  an  eye  in 
search  of  masculine  approval.  In  a  well- 
ordered  world  each  sex  will  be  yet  more  eager 
to  secure  the  approval  of  the  other  than  it  is 
at  present.  But  in  a  movement  which  ex- 
isted to  emancipate  women  it  was  a  great  loss 
that  even  its  leaders  failed  to  break  away 
from  the  masculine  idea  of  the  objects  of 
emancipation  and  the  methods  by  which 
emancipation  should  be  secured.  Here  and 


142   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

there  the  feminist  cause  was  illumined  by  the 
sturdy  independence  of  shrewd  observers  like 
Mrs  Swanwick  and  Mrs  Stanbury.  Beneath 
the  fanaticism  of  Miss  Mary  Gawthorpe  and 
the  Pankhursts  there  lay  an  originality  which 
was  criminally  stifled  by  a  too  hurriedly 
adopted  policy.  And,  in  spite  of  her  docile 
acceptance  of  the  Buss-Beale  theories,  crises 
in  the  National  Union  of  Women's  Suffrage 
Societies  revealed  in  Mrs  Fawcett  a  self- 
reliance  which,  though  it  sometimes  sug- 
gested autocracy,  gave  ground  for  regret  that 
she  had  not  trusted  her  magnificent  common- 
sense  in  the  earlier  stages  of  her  political 
career.  But  by  most  of  the  suffrage  speakers 
individual  thought  was  so  little  cultivated 
that  the  difference  between  their  speeches 
was  one  of  manner  rather  than  of  matter. 
It  was  the  rarest  thing  in  the  world  to  hear 
one  of  them  produce  a  fresh  idea.  If  she  did, 
it  immediately  found  its  way  into  the  reper- 
tory of  a  score  of  other  orators.  But  for  the 
incalculable  influence  of  the  human  voice 
and  personality,  the  speeches  might  easily 
have  been  reduced  to  the  authorised  version 
of  a  gramophone  record.  The  grinding  life 
of  most  of  the  speakers  left,  indeed,  no  time 
for  study  or  reflection.  They  knew  little  of 
economics,  of  local  government,  of  Imperial 


SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  143 

legislation,  except  what  they  gained  from 
their  daily  papers  or  from  the  speeches  and 
conversation  of  more  leisured  suffragists. 
Many  of  them  transformed  themselves  into 
glib  and  entertaining  speakers  by  concocting 
a  hotch-potch  of  the  speeches  of  the  more 
notable  suffragists.  One  could  analyse  from 
their  addresses,  here  a  point  made  two  years 
ago  by  Mrs  Fawcett,  there  a  joke  of  Mr  Zang- 
will's,  there  an  anecdote  charmingly  told  by 
Dr  Anna  Shaw  on  her  last  visit  to  England, 
here  an  argument  first  put  forward  by  Mr 
Pethick  Lawrence,  and  there  a  score  made  by 
Mrs  Swan  wick.  Although  the  suffrage  ques- 
tion is  one  whose  limits  are  very  hard  to  de- 
fine, it  was  generally  agreed  that  one  spoke 
either  on  "  the  economic  question,"  which 
usually  resolved  itself  into  a  discussion  of 
women's  wages,  or  on  "  the  political  situa- 
tion," or  on  "  the  housing  question,"  or  on 
"  the  moral  question  "  (that  is,  the  White 
Slave  Traffic  and  venereal  diseases),  or  per- 
haps on  the  powers,  limitations  and  achieve- 
ments of  women  in  local  government.  Or 
perhaps  one  spoke  on  the  policy  of  the  differ- 
ent suffrage  societies,  or  "  replied  to  anti- 
suffrage  arguments."  Under  each  of  these 
headings  most  suffrage  speakers  kept  a  fund 
of  arguments  and  anecdotes.  The  chief 


144  TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

drawback  was  that  it  was  usually  a  common 
fund.  Thus  it  sometimes  happened  that 
there  would  be  bitter  ill  feeling  on  a  platform 
because  the  first  speaker  had  touched  each  of 
these  questions,  used  the  best  stories  attached 
to  each,  and  left  nothing  but  vain  repetition 
or  inferior  arguments  to  the  speakers  who 
followed.  And  once,  at  a  great  outdoor 
demonstration,  at  which  the  speakers  passed 
from  platform  to  platform  without  hearing 
each  other's  speeches,  the  audience  at  one 
platform  heard  three  well-known  speakers 
tell  the  same  story  in  much  the  same  manner 
to  illustrate  the  same  argument. 

Now,  a  lack  of  originality  in  suffragist 
speakers  is  very  far  from  proving  an  inability 
to  use  a  parliamentary  vote.  To  be  sure,  it 
was  excellent  logic  when  an  anti-suffrage 
woman  speaker  burst  into  tears  and  declared 
that  she  would  not  finish  her  speech  if  people 
were  allowed  to  heckle  her.  She  was  there 
to  demonstrate  feminine  weakness.  Suffra- 
gist speakers,  however,  proved  their  mental 
fitness  for  the  vote  quite  adequately  by  show- 
ing a  power  fully  equal  to  that  of  the  average 
male  elector  of  understanding  current  political 
questions.  Their  mental  docility  is  lamented 
here  solely  because  one  naturally  looked  to 
suffragists  for  the  intellectual  activity  which 


SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  145 

had  not  yet  begun  among  the  mass  of  women 
outside  the  suffrage  movement.  If  it  does 
not  greatly  matter  whether  this  activity  is 
roused  in  women  before  they  are  enfran- 
chised, it  does  not  follow  that  it  is  other  than 
indispensable  for  the  larger  aims  of  feminism. 
Moreover,  it  is  evidently  a  national  waste  if 
potentially  good  brains,  even  of  a  second-rate 
character,  are  in  large  quantities  kept  unused 
for  an  indefinite  or  perpetual  period "  in 
domestic  inertia.  It  is  possible  that  a  future 
generation  may  discover  that  women  are 
fitted  to  use  their  minds  finely  rather  than 
originally.  Humanity  always  protects  itself 
from  the  consequences  of  its  own  errors  by  a 
blessed  inconsistency,  and  the  experimental 
activities  of  the  women  of  this  generation  in 
a  variety  of  occupations  will  leave  numbers 
untouched  in  an  old-world  domesticity.  But 
it  is  very  certain  that  the  unrest  among 
modern  women  has  by  no  means  been  ended 
by  the  war.  In  1914,  indeed,  it  had  probably 
barely  begun.  It  was,  after  all,  confined  to 
a  mere  percentage.  And,  when  the  war  is 
ended,  much  trouble  and  bitterness  will  be 
avoided  if,  instead  of  blaspheming  against 
humanity  by  echoing  the  opinions  of  the 
Pankhursts  or  John  Stuart  Mill  or  St  Paul  or 
any  other  leader,  the  mass  of  women  acquire 


146  TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

the  habit  of  investigating  for  themselves 
their  own  problems.  Leaders  are,  at  best, 
a  frail  support.  The  disciples  of  Sabbathi 
Zebi  were  self-reliant  enough  to  preach  their 
faith  even  after  their  supposed  Messiah  had 
become  a  Moslem,  but  if  the  pre-war  feminists 
had  been  betrayed  by  their  leaders  probably 
most  of  them  would  have  spurned  their 
suffragism.  The  pre-war  leaders  echoed  the 
opinions  of  women  who  had  misjudged  the 
needs  of  their  time.  Unless  the  same  mis- 
take is  to  be  repeated  after  the  war  the  rank 
and  file  must  judge  for  themselves  what  are 
the  real  needs  of  women.  The  vote  is  likely 
enough  to  be  given  them  without  further 
agitation.  But  the  vote  is  one  of  the  smallest 
needs  of  women  driven  out  into  a  widening 
sphere  of  social  evolution.  One  of  their  first 
necessities  will  be  leisure  to  think  and 
organise.  And  for  married  women,  the 
women  best  fitted  to  be  thinkers,  that  leisure 
can  only  be  acquired  by  the  reform  of  the 
home.  They  will  have  to  refuse  to  take  the 
serious  view  of  wifehood  and  motherhood  so 
comically  held  by  their  foremothers.  They 
will  have  to  realise  that  a  woman  can  be  a 
good  comrade  to  her  husband  and  children, 
and  can  really  be  very  little  more,  and 
that  this  duty  certainly  need  not,  and 


SIN  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST  147 

indeed    cannot,     occupy    all    her    working 
hours. 

It  is  because  the  supreme  piety  of  inde- 
pendent thought  has  been  more  neglected  by 
women  than  by  men  that  the  former's  most 
serious  combination  for  reform  effected  little. 
It  is  because  of  that  neglect  that  no  very 
great  confidence  can  yet  be  felt  in  any 
feminine  war  work  for  the  reorganisation  of 
education.  Only  when  they  themselves  have 
been  educated  rather  than  moulded  will 
women  be  able  to  take  any  prominent  share 
in  the  task  of  levelling  up  the  national 
intellect.  The  so-called  higher  education 
has  either  been  seed  wasted  on  stony  ground 
or  else  has  been  unfitted  to  the  feminine  mind. 
In  any  case  the  great  need  of  the  nation 
to-day  is  not  scholarship,  but  the  scientific, 
practical  training  which  will  equip  it  for  that 
more  merciless  commercial  struggle  which 
seems  likely  to  follow  the  war. 


XI 

THE   FORTUNE   OF   WAR 

IN  the  hey-day  of  dialectic  which  preceded 
the  war  anti-suffrage  speakers  loved  above 
all  their  arguments  the  plea  that  women 
could  not  fight.  It  was  an  argument  that 
gave  great  pleasure  to  the  masculine  part  of 
an  audience  and  taught  the  feminine  part  its 
place,  and  it  was  one  that  was  never  definitely 
put  out  of  action  by  its  opponents.  It  had 
not  then  been  discovered  that  modern  wars 
must  increase  the  civic  value  of  women  and 
their  claim  to  enfranchisement  by  making 
their  labour  essential  to  the  production  of 
munitions  and  the  continuance  of  a  nation's 
industries,  and  therefore  suffragists  were 
accustomed  to  make  two  foolish  retorts. 
First  they  remarked  that  even  in  times  of 
peace  large  numbers  of  women  died  in  child- 
birth. And,  secondly,  they  declared  that 
the  admission  of  women  to  the  electorate 
would  strengthen  the  hands  of  peace-lovers 
and  make  it  more  difficult  for  governments 
to  declare  war. 

148 


THE  FORTUNE  OF  WAR         149 

Now  there  is  clearly  no  very  close  parallel 
between  the  child-bearing  for  which  the 
feminine  body  is  so  planned  that  it  is  posi- 
tively unhealthy  if  it  continues  permanently 
without  it,  and  the  battlefield  agonies  which 
are  so  far  from  being  natural  to  the  masculine 
body  that  a  man's  power  of  enduring  physical 
pain  is  almost  always  inferior  to  a  woman's. 
And  the  suffragist  theory  that  women  are 
more  peace-loving  than  men  has  been  entirely 
destroyed  by  the  present  war.  In  August 
1914  a  handful  of  suffragists  were  inclined 
to  protest  against  Britain's  intervention  in  a 
Continental  struggle.  Later,  a  few  English 
women  of  little  influence  went  over  to 
Holland  to  meet  women  equally  uninfluential 
from  various  other  countries  to  consider  the 
possibility  of  agitating  for  peace.  Also, 
some  of  those  who  were  once  well  known  as 
suffrage  speakers  are  now  enrolled  in  the 
Union  of  Democratic  Control.  But  no  one 
who  remembers  the  pride  with  which  in  the 
early  days  of  the  war  the  reservists'  wives 
said  good-bye  to  their  husbands,  the  en- 
thusiasm with  which  women  cheered  the 
troops,  the  resolution  with  which  they  urged 
their  men-folks  to  enlist,  the  scorn  heaped  by 
them  upon  "  slackers,"  or  the  frequent  ex- 
pression of  their  bloodthirsty  desire  to  "  tear 


150   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

the  Kaiser  limb  from  limb,"  can  suppose  that 
they  are  naturally  a  pacifist  sex.  The  truth 
is  that  since  in  neither  sex  is  the  judgment  of 
public  questions  normally  decided  by  sexual 
emotions,  in  both  a  very  similar  opinion  tends 
to  be  deduced  from  similar  data.  A  man  in 
concluding  that  a  war  is  inevitable  is  not  as 
a  rule  turned  from  that  conclusion  by  the 
consideration  that  he  himself  may  eventually 
have  to  fight  in  it  or  that  war  is  cruel  and 
ruinous  and  uncivilising.  Nor  does  any 
mental  picture  of  the  horror  of  war  or  the 
knowledge  that  it  may  rob  her  of  her  husband 
or  lover  or  brother  or  son  weaken  a  woman's 
first  belief  in  its  necessity.  Her  mind  is 
simply  a  sexless  and  indistinguishable  part 
of  the  public  opinion  which  makes  the  war 
possible. 

And  in  acknowledging  that  there  is  always 
in  the  mass  of  men — at  least  at  the  beginning 
of  a  war — a  definite  pleasure,  either  in  the 
prospect  of  taking  part  in  it,  or,  more  brutally, 
in  the  prospect  of  reading  and  hearing  about 
it,  it  must  be  admitted  that  this  pleasure  has 
its  counterpart  in  the  natural  brutality  of 
women.  No  one  who  has  spent  even  a  short 
period  in  Germany  on  terms  of  intimacy 
with  large  numbers  of  German  families  can 
fail  to  be  aware  that  the  militant  spirit  there 


THE  FORTUNE  OF  WAR         151 

is  fostered  by  women  far  more  consistently 
than  by  male  civilians.  The  average  German 
woman  worships  the  army,  adores  soldiers, 
sees  more  beauty  in  a  husband's  cheek  scarred 
by  an  old  duelling  cut  than  in  the  handsomest 
features  unmarred  by  barbarity.  And  if 
there  was  in  Germany  before  the  war  a  desire 
to  fight  England  it  was  German  women  who 
more  than  the  mass  of  German  men  desired 
to  prove  the  omnipotence  of  their  army  and 
to  test  the  strength  of  their  fleet.  Women, 
in  fact,  are  no  more  civilised  than  their  men- 
folk, and,  on  account  of  their  subordinate 
part  in  industry  and  commerce,  their  war-like 
spirit  has  not  been  softened,  as  men's  has 
sometimes  been,  by  the  frequent  recollection 
of  war's  economic  disadvantages.  The 
peace-loving  woman,  compassionate  alike  to 
friend  and  foe,  is  a  type  evidently  mythical. 
In  principles  and  prejudices  at  least  women 
advance  side  by  side  with  men.  More,  it 
may  even  be  asked  with  some  reason  whether 
women  are  not  everywhere  responsible  for 
the  amazing  strength  of  that  undercurrent  of 
prejudice  which  floods  at  last  into  a  national 
policy.  A  modern  convention  has  supposed 
them  more  tender  than  men,  just  as  in  the 
eighteenth  century  it  supposed  them  more 
timid,  but  both  notions  are  confuted  by 


152   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

history.  Deborah  leading  armies  by  the  side 
of  Barak,  Jael  stealing  into  a  guest's  tent  to 
murder  him  treacherously,  the  Roman  women 
delighting  in  gladiatorial  fights  and  gloating 
over  the  sight  of  Christians  torn  by  lions,  the 
mediaeval  women  at  the  tournament  and  the 
modern  Spanish  woman  at  the  bull-fight, 
the  Turkish  women  sharpshooters  of  the 
present  war  and  the  women  in  the  Serbian  and 
Russian  armies  and  the  bold  women  snipers 
among  the  Sinn  Fein  rebels,  do  not  suggest  a 
sex  naturally  averse  from  bloodshed  or  lack- 
ing in  courage.  Moreover,  the  conscientious 
objectors  against  conscription  have  sought 
in  vain  for  an  effective  feminine  support. 
Indeed,  the  general  feeling  that  women  should 
not  be  enrolled  in  armies  is  not  explained  by 
their  own  distaste  for  war  any  more  than  by 
a  normal  physical  incapacity.  Most  healthy 
young  women  at  the  beginning  of  this  war 
longed  to  join  the  army,  and  the  woman  who 
is  strong  enough  to  work  on  the  land  or  in  a 
munitions  factory  is  certainly  strong  enough 
to  bear  arms.  Nor  is  there  any  sentimental 
objection  to  the  enlistment  of  a  robust  young 
girl  who  is  not  a  mother.  But  by  general 
consent  women  are  confined  to  civil  employ- 
ments simply  because,  since  the  madness 
of  bloodshedding  notoriously  weakens  self- 


THE  FORTUNE  OF  WAR         153 

control,  the  protection  of  their  honour  could 
in  no  army  be  guaranteed. 

The  suffragists'  argument  certainly  bore 
a  specious  appearance  of  common-sense.  It 
might  perhaps  be  supposed  by  a  shallow 
observer  that  a  mother  would  suffer  any 
indignity  rather  than  send  her  son  into 
danger.  But  history  does  not  record  a  time 
when  patriotism  has  not  been  a  stronger 
feeling  than  maternity,  when  the  average 
mother  has  not  preferred  for  her  son  death 
rather  than  dishonour.  Among  savage 
tribes  her  pride  in  her  son  is  fed  by  his  fight- 
ing powers ;  among  civilised  peoples  she  is 
justified  only  by  war  in  her  curious  belief 
in  male  superiority.  The  modern  mother  is 
secretly  aware  that  her  son's  ordinary  em- 
ployment could  be  performed  equally  well 
by  her  daughter.  But  she  prefers  her  son, 
not  merely  because  the  belief  that  a  man  has 
a  better  time  than  a  woman,  or  the  know- 
ledge that  a  mother  is  better  loved  by  her 
sons  than  by  her  daughters  made  her  want 
a  son  rather  than  a  daughter  long  before  he 
was  born.  Nor  is  her  preference  due  to 
sexual  attraction.  The  true  explanation  is 
that  she  has  inherited  from  all  the  ages  the 
belief,  born  of  war,  that  a  man  is  a  stronger 
and  a  finer  thing  than  a  woman.  This 


154  TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

theory  droops  in  peace ;  it  only  really 
blossoms  in  war.  And  therefore  a  war  is 
necessary  to  restore  to  the  disappointed 
mother  her  old  belief  in  the  superiority  of  her 
son.  She  cannot  really  protest  against  the 
horrors  which  hold  for  her  this  secret  solace. 
The  fact  is  that  of  all  the  follies  of  the  pre- 
war suffragists  the  maddest  was  the  persist- 
ent attempt  to  identify  women  as  a  whole 
with  sectional  causes.  There  was  a  flourish- 
ing hope  that  all  women  might  in  time  be- 
come suffragists — most  of  them,  probably, 
after  they  were  enfranchised.  But  there  was 
no  reasonable  ground  for  the  supposition  that 
even  the  majority  of  Englishwomen  could  be 
converted  to  pacifism  or  total  abstinence. 
Unfortunately,  pacifism  and  temperance  and 
Christianity  and  many  other  irrelevant 
causes  were  constantly  preached  from  plat- 
forms ostensibly  hired  for  purposes  of  suffrage 
propaganda.  The  suffragist  support  of  total 
prohibition  in  many  of  the  American  states 
has  seriously  damaged  transatlantic  suffra- 
gist prospects,  and  if  over  here  the  pacifists 
had  had  their  way  and  had  succeeded  in 
identifying  the  various  suffrage  societies  with 
their  own  cause,  the  result  would  certainly 
have  been  the  total  and  lasting  collapse  of  the 
suffrage  movement. 


THE  FORTUNE  OF  WAR         155 

Fortunately,  that  identification  had  never 
been  effected.  The  faint  voices  of  the 
pacifists  had  cried  in  a  wilderness,  and  1915 
found  thousands  of  women  offering  them- 
selves for  war- work.  By  the  end  of  the  year 
the  whole  position  of  women  had  been  trans- 
formed. In  almost  every  country  engaged 
in  the  war  they  had  shown  that  in  modern 
conditions  the  success  of  a  war  ultimately 
depends,  not  on  the  longest  purse,  but  on  the 
strength  and  discipline  and  enthusiasm  of 
the  women,  whose  labour  alone  can  keep  that 
purse  filled  ;  on  their  thrift  and  self-sacrifice  ; 
on  their  growing  consciousness  of  an  indi- 
vidual civic  responsibility.  It  is  a  revelation 
which  may  possibly  bring  triumph  to  the 
suffragist  cause  without  any  renewal  of  the 
suffrage  agitation.  To  women  who  have 
gloriously  served  their  country  it  would 
certainly  be  an  outrage  to  refuse  enfranchise- 
ment. And,  with  enfranchisement  gained, 
they  will  be  free  to  go  on  towards  the  larger 
aims  of  feminism. 

The  writer  leaves  altogether  on  one  side 
the  question  whether  after  this  war  it  will  be 
possible  to  work  for  a  general  disarmament. 
This  war  was  preceded  by  a  more  general 
love  of  peace  than  had  been  known  since  the 
eleventh-century  Truce  of  God.  There  had 


156   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

never  been  a  more  enthusiastic  agitation  for 
the  settlement  of  international  disputes  by 
arbitration.  In  July  1889  the  President 
of  the  International  Arbitration  and  Peace 
Association  wrote  to  Baroness  von  Suttner  : 
"At  no  time,  perhaps,  in  the  history  of  the 
world  has  the  cause  of  peace  and  good  will 
been  more  hopeful.  It  seems  that  at  last 
the  long  night  of  death  and  destruction  will 
pass  away  ;  and  we  who  are  on  the  mountain- 
top  of  humanity  think  that  we  see  the  first 
streaks  of  the  dawn  of  the  kingdom  of  heaven 
upon  earth."  But  though  that  optimism 
was  mocked  by  the  numerous  wars  that 
followed,  there  had  certainly  spread  in 
Britain  between  1906  and  1914  a  very 
general  feeling  that  Europe  at  least  was  grow- 
ing so  civilised  that  a  war  between  any  of 
the  great  Powers  was  unthinkable.  If  the 
principal  women's  organisations  had  been  so 
misled  by  this  feeling  as  to  imagine  that  it 
was  possible  for  them  to  remain  hostile  to  a 
war,  and  refuse  to  take  any  share  in  it,  the 
feminist  cause  would  certainly  have  been 
wrecked.  The  mass  of  women  would  have 
disregarded  their  former  spokeswomen  and 
thrown  themselves  into  war  activities,  but 
there  would  have  been  none  with  authority 
or  desire  to  point  the  moral  of  their  devotion. 


THE  FORTUNE  OF  WAR         157 

And  for  the  women  of  to-morrow  it  is  in 
the  moral  of  this  war  work  that  the  great 
value  of  the  feminine  share  of  the  war  con- 
sists. Women  have  demonstrated  at  last 
that  there  is  practically  no  civic  or  industrial 
enterprise  in  which  they  are  unfitted  to  take 
part.  They  have  shown  the  folly  of  the  old 
belief  that  they  are  of  value  only  as  wives 
and  mothers  and  prostitutes  and  housewives. 
They  have  proved  that  it  is  as  great  a  national 
waste  to  attempt  to  confine  their  energies  to 
the  sphere  of  love  and  housewifery  as  it 
would  be  to  attempt  to  confine  the  mass  of 
men  to  cattle-breeding  or  grouse- shooting  or 
boxing.  The  fortune  of  war  has  suddenly 
plumped  at  women's  feet  a  supreme  oppor- 
tunity. It  has  given  them  a  priceless  ad- 
vantage. But  it  remains  to  be  seen  whether 
that  advantage  will  be  retained.  It  is  in 
their  power  now  to  secure  that  better  part  in 
civic  life  and  in  industry  which  shall  not  be 
taken  away  from  them.  So  far,  however, 
they  have  done  nothing  to  secure  it.  They 
have  not  formed  strong  trade  unions  for  the 
new  classes  of  women  workers,  nor  have  any 
very  conspicuous  efforts  been  made  to  enroll 
them  in  the  unions  already  existing.  There 
are  no  signs  that  any  large  numbers  of  women 
with  capital  are  becoming  employers,  or  that 


158   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

the  existing  system  of  feminine  education  is 
likely  soon  to  be  superseded  by  one  adapted 
to  modern  needs.  And  it  is,  unhappily,  only 
too  likely  that  if  they  are  putting  their  trust 
in  anything  so  ephemeral  as  a  public  senti- 
ment they  will  again  be  fooled.  At  the 
moment  the  nation  is  deeply  grateful  to  its 
women.  But  its  gratitude  will  be  of  no 
value  at  all  if  they  do  not  now  consolidate 
the  power  they  have  so  newly  gained. 


XII 

A   STRAIGHT   TIP  FOR   FEMINISTS 

GRADUALLY  it  becomes  possible  to  form  some 
fairly  definite  idea  as  to  what  appears  to  be 
the  sanest  policy  for  feminists  to  adopt  when 
the  nations  are  at  peace  again.  It  is  quite 
possible  that  there  may  be  a  general  feeling 
that  enfranchisement  cannot  be  refused  to 
the  women  who  have  kept  the  army  armed 
and  the  nation  prosperous.  Or  perhaps  the 
dominant  political  party  may  think  it  a  useful 
move  in  a  period  of  some  electoral  uncertainty 
to  support  women's  suffrage,  and,  since  en- 
franchisement would  be  of  secondary  use  to 
women,  this  would  be  a  move  undeniably 
helpful  to  feminist  progress.  Parliamentary 
representation  under  modern  conditions  is 
likely  to  be  less  advantageous  to  women 
workers  than  in  the  earliest  years  of  the 
working-class  vote  it  was  to  men's  trade 
unions,  for  many  of  the  biggest  concessions 
have  been  already  secured  to  trade  unionism 
generally  by  the  masculine  vote,  and  can  be 
claimed  by  women  workers  without  the  vote 
159 


160   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

when  their  own  unions  are  popularised.  But 
it  Is  easy  to  think  of  advantages  which  women 
will  ultimately  gain  from  political  emancipa- 
tion even  if  their  enfranchisement  is  slow  to 
bear  fruit.  The  writer's  argument  is  merely 
that  the  suffrage  agitation  was  before  the  war, 
and  if  revived  in  peace  is  likely  to  be  again, 
so  wasteful  and  disorganising,  and  on  the 
whole  unprofitable,  that  it  will  be  far  more 
advisable  to  turn  the  feminist  forces  into 
other  channels.  Admission  to  the  franchise 
can,  after  all,  be  only  the  beginning  of  the 
feminist  campaign.  If  women  are  industri- 
ally powerful,  politicians  may  be  trusted  to 
sue  their  favour  with  the  gift  of  the  suffrage. 
Let  the  pother  and  vexation  of  deciding  on 
what  basis  women  should  be  enfranchised, 
and  winning  for  their  proposal  the  support 
of  the  present  electors,  be  left  to  the  parlia- 
mentary party  that  adopts  the  new  policy. 
And  meanwhile  let  women,  putting  no  trust 
in  politicians  until  performance  confirms  their 
promises,  thriftily  reserve  and  increase  their 
resources  by  devoting  themselves  to  the  task 
of  improving  their  economic  position. 

There  is  no  originality  in  this  proposal. 
The  late  Mr  Booker  Washington,  realising 
either  that  the  vote  was  practically  unattain- 
able by  those  economically  negligible,  or  that 


A  STRAIGHT  TIP  FOR  FEMINISTS  161 

for  a  subject  race  or  class  it  could  be  only  a 
blunted  weapon  until  sharpened  by  economic 
power,  urged  that  the  American  negroes 
should  postpone  their  campaign  for  political 
emancipation  until  they  were  industrially 
emancipated.  He  was  accused  of  playing 
into  the  hands  of  the  whites  because  his 
system  of  industrial  education  made  the 
negroes  better  employees,  and  because  his 
attempts  to  make  them  thrifty  and  land- 
owning raised  the  price  of  land  and  provided 
good  customers  for  white  business  men. 

"  But  no  one  who  has  studied  the  history 
of  oppressed  races,"  says  a  writer  in  The 
New  Republic  of  20th  November  1915,  "  can 
question  the  correctness  of  Booker  Washing- 
ton's tactics  or  the  soundness  of  his  phil- 
osophy. .  .  .  For  hundreds  of  years  the  op- 
pressed races  of  Europe  have  struggled  to 
raise  themselves  through  political  agitation 
and  social  striving — in  vain.  These  are  not 
solvents  sufficiently  powerful  to  relax  the 
cohesion  of  the  ruling  caste.  But  where  the 
Slovene  or  Ukrainian  has  succeeded  in  gain- 
ing economic  power  the  weight  of  oppression 
begins  to  lift.  If  the  goal  of  an  oppressed 
race  is  political  equality,  economic  progress 
is  usually  the  only  feasible  road  to  its  attain- 
ment. ...  A  ruling  race  will  never  relax  its 
grip  upon  the  political  power  in  response  to 


162   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

the  moral  and  intellectual  striving  of  a  sub- 
ject race.  But  a  ruling  race  will  countenance 
attempts  on  the  part  of  the  oppressed  to  in- 
crease their  economic  efficiency,  partly  be- 
cause the  members  of  the  ruling  race  hope  to 
profit  thereby,  and  partly  because  a  ruling 
race  affects  to  despise  the  purely  economic 
field  and  whatever  goes  on  in  it.  The  sub- 
ject race  can  elevate  itself  through  industry 
and  thrift  without  encountering  any  serious 
opposition.  To  develop  these  qualities  by 
education,  precept,  organised  propaganda,  is 
the  first  duty  of  the  leader  of  a  race  which  finds 
itself  in  a  condition  of  political  subjection." 

Between  the  political  and  industrial  position 
of  American  negroes  and  that  of  women  there 
is  an  obvious  parallel,  and  the  reflection  that 
follows  experience  urges  that  for  women  in- 
dustrial effort  is  as  properly  antecedent  to 
enfranchisement  as  it  is  for  the  negroes.  The 
industrial  position  of  women  in  this  country 
is  admittedly  inferior  to  their  industrial 
ability,  and  the  present  time,  when  women  of 
all  classes  are  pouring  into  the  labour  market, 
is  a  time  especially  favourable  for  the  im- 
provement of  that  position.  Women  who 
possess  ability  and  capital  should  make  every 
effort  to  obtain  first  business  training  and 
experience  and  ultimately  partnership  in 
firms  which  have  lost  partners  through  the 


A  STRAIGHT  TIP  FOR  FEMINISTS  163 

war.  Younger  women  who  before  the  war 
would  have  struggled  for  academic  honours 
should  receive  a  sound  commercial  training 
and  should  be  helped  by  their  parents  to 
enter  a  good  business,  just  as  on  the  Continent 
girls  are  helped  into  marriage  by  a  dowry. 
Existing  women's  colleges  should  be  trans- 
formed into  commercial  training  centres  of 
a  superior  type.  The  study  in  women's 
colleges  of  the  classics,  philosophy,  English 
and  foreign  literature,  philology,  theology, 
geology,  Egyptology,  and  other  intellectual 
luxuries  and  the  detailed  study  of  history 
might  be  for  a  time  at  least  altogether  re- 
nounced and  the  study  for  commercial  ends 
of  mathematics,  modern  languages,  chem- 
istry, engineering,  economics,  banking,  archi- 
tecture, etc.,  substituted.  The  importance 
for  girls  of  a  technical  course  as  an  addition 
to  the  ordinary  school  training  should  be 
everywhere  urged.  Finally,  the  women  who 
are  already  work-dependent,  and  those  who 
later  become  so,  women  whose  work  is  de- 
pendent upon  the  good  will  of  an  employer, 
should  all  be  urged,  and  if  possible  compelled, 
to  join  trade  unions. 

If  it  is  argued  that  most  work-dependent 
women  take  no  interest  in  trade  unionism,  it 
must  be  remembered  that  women  as  a  whole 


164   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

took  no  interest  in  woman's  suffrage,  and 
that  while  it  can  be  no  more  difficult  to  per- 
suade them  to  join  a  trade  union  than  to  per- 
suade them  to  join  a  suffrage  society,  the 
former  is  decidedly  the  more  urgent  effort. 
The  truth  is  that  the  showier  political  agita- 
tion has  kept  out  of  the  industrial  agitation 
most  of  the  leaders  and  most  of  the  funds 
that  ought  to  have  been  employed  in 
strengthening  the  existing  women's  unions  and 
creating  new  ones.  Women's  trade  unionism 
has  never  had  a  reasonable  chance.  The  low 
pay  and  consequent  mental  suppression  of  the 
existing  members  have  made  outside  help  to 
float  the  unions  indispensable,  and  that  help 
has  been  squandered  on  the  suffrage  move- 
ment. Women's  trade  unions  have  existed 
on  so  small  a  scale  that  an  occasional  strike 
has  left  very  little  impression  on  the  public 
mind.  What  is  wanted  is  the  inclusion  in 
the  unions  of  those  women  who  although 
work-dependent  are  nevertheless  able  to 
subscribe  to  the  union  funds  more  largely 
than  the  present  members,  and  will  also  be 
able  to  contribute  mental  advantages  to  a 
fighting  body.  While  the  rise  and  increase 
of  notable  women  employers  (who  will  prob- 
ably be  much  more  tyrannical  than  men  em- 
ployers) will  probably  do  far  more  at  first 


A  STRAIGHT  TIP  FOR  FEMINISTS  165 

than  trade  unionism  will  do  to  raise  the 
industrial  status  of  women,  the  economic 
future  of  women  as  a  whole  must  largely 
depend  upon  their  success  in  establishing  in 
the  teeth  of  the  present  spirit  of  sacrifice 
unions  strong  enough  to  demand  satisfactory 
conditions  of  work,  to  secure  adequate  wages 
for  qualified  workers,  and  to  see  to  it  that 
there  is  no  sudden  fall  in  women's  wages  in 
any  period  of  stagnation  that  may  follow  the 
war.  The  war  has  provided  a  supreme  oppor- 
tunity for  the  consolidation  of  the  advantages 
already  gained  by  women  and  the  attainment 
of  others ;  it  will  be  a  supreme  treachery 
to  humanity  if  that  opportunity  is  not  used. 
A  great  many  paths  to  emancipation  have 
already  been  attempted  without  much  gain 
to  the  sex  as  a  whole.  Art  has  long  provided 
a  sphere  in  which  there  is  sex  equality,  and 
the  feminine  right  to  sacrifice  health  to  win 
academic  scalps  and  afterwards  to  earn  an 
income  incapable  of  providing  for  old  age 
is  generously  recognised.  Since  the  days  of 
Mrs  Behn  women  writers  have  been  able  to 
earn  a  living  by  their  pen,  and  no  one  in 
these  days  is  in  the  least  degree  horrified 
when  women  travellers  ride  on  motor  bicycles 
from  Cairo  to  Cape  Town,  or  wander  alone  to 
paint  pagodas  and  blossoming  fruit  trees  in 


166   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

the  wildest  parts  of  China.  But  higher  educa- 
tion and  adventure  and  the  suffrage  cam- 
paign have  left  the  average  woman  in  very 
much  the  same  circumstances  as  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  feminist  agitation.  A  small  body 
of  adventurous  women  for  a  time  turned 
the  world  upside  down,  but  there  remains 
the  great  mass  of  mentally  flaccid  women 
who  would  not  to  save  their  skins  do  any- 
thing so  entirely  contrary  to  social  precedent. 
Yet  at  the  present  time  it  is  precisely  the 
mass  of  women  who  for  the  common  weal 
must  be  prodded  into  activity.  If  feminine 
coquetry  is  embarrassing  British  commerce 
by  swelling  imports  and  bottling  labour  in 
unproductive  industries,  it  is  clear  that  an 
intelligent  womanhood  too  usefully  occupied 
to  preserve  the  present  hypertrophied  appe- 
tite for  ornament  is  a  national  necessity. 
And  if  during  the  war  industry  must  rely 
more  and  more  upon  feminine  labour,  it  is 
exceedingly  desirable  that  the  capricious 
element  in  that  labour  should  be  minimised. 
Feminine  economic  ambition  is  naturally 
blunted  by  the  knowledge  that  while  it  is 
practically  impossible  for  a  woman  to  pro- 
vide for  her  old  age  by  her  own  earnings, 
there  is  always  rather  more  than  a  sporting 
chance  that  marriage  will  give  her  security. 


A  STRAIGHT  TIP  FOR  FEMINISTS  167 

That  is,  a  man's  chances  of  earning  security 
are  normally  far  better  than  a  woman's. 
Therefore  until  the  present  war  it  has  always 
been  sounder  commercial  wisdom  for  a 
woman  to  equip  herself  to  secure  a  husband 
than  to  equip  herself  to  get  good  work.  And 
if  she  qualifies  herself  for  good  work,  by  that 
very  effort  she  has  often  been  likely  to  lose 
her  chances  of  a  husband.  If,  then,  women 
by  organisation  and  combination  can  secure 
higher  earnings,  they  will  be  providing  also 
a  motive  for  a  higher  standard  of  work. 
Women  in  the  mass  will  not  be,  as  they  have 
hitherto  been,  dependent  on  masculine  sup- 
port for  everything  they  desire  in  addi- 
tion to  food  and  clothing,  and  they  will  be 
able  to  take  a  whole-hearted  interest  in  their 
employment.  And  if  the  women's  trade 
unions,  becoming,  as  they  ultimately  must, 
politically  as  well  as  industrially  powerful,  use 
their  political  power  to  reform  the  marriage 
law,  and  institute  endowment  of  motherhood 
and  creches  of  different  grades  to  leave 
mothers  free  to  work,  and  to  give  the  State 
the  power  to  direct  the  lives  of  the  children 
of  all  classes,  then  it  will  indeed  be  possible 
for  women  to  live  a  full  life,  and  the  old  rest- 
lessness which  has  almost  universally  lowered 
the  value  of  their  work  will  at  last  be  stilled. 


168   TOWARDS  A  SANE  FEMINISM 

The  organisation  of  women's  home  life  to  fit 
the  demands  of  the  labour  market  becomes 
more  and  more  pressingly  necessary.  This 
does  not  mean  that  the  labour  market  is  more 
important  than  the  home,  but  simply  that 
economic  independence  is  vitally  necessary 
for  women  in  order  that  the  full  beauty  of 
home  life  may  be  secured.  For  the  home  is 
so  delicate  an  organisation  that  its  beauty 
fades  wherever  love  is  dependent  upon  a 
husband's  financial  contributions. 

One  more  question  conspicuously  arises : 
What,  after  all,  is  the  feminism  towards 
which  women  are  advancing  ?  It  is  the  dis- 
appearance of  feminism,  its  ultimate  absorp- 
tion in  the  common  cause  of  humanity. 
Wherever  a  democratic  spirit  has  begun  to 
stir  a  nation  women  have  first  striven  by  the 
side  of  men  to  win  masculine  freedom.  Later 
comes  a  time  when  masculine  liberties  are 
secured  and  the  majority  of  men  find  very 
chivalrous  reasons  for  not  sharing  them  with 
women.  It  is  then  that  feminism  interferes 
to  delay  masculine  progress  till  women  are 
abreast  with  it.  But  when  a  further  stage  of 
civilisation  gives  women  the  same  liberties  as 
men,  the  sexes  may  reasonably  be  expected 
to  work  together  in  civic  and  industrial  life 
without  the  interruption  of  sex  bickerings. 


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